


This Old Machine

by saltandrockets



Series: I Don't Want Love [5]
Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015), Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: (or as close as you can come to it while being literal cold blooded killers??), Domestic Bliss, Kid Fic, M/M, Mpreg, Slice of Life, Soft Kylux, Trans Hux, evil space dads, hello naughty murderers it's children time, the continuing adventure’s of the galaxy’s most dysfunctional family
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-20
Updated: 2016-12-20
Packaged: 2018-09-09 23:17:47
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 25,254
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8917018
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/saltandrockets/pseuds/saltandrockets
Summary: “It’s strange. I never imagined having…” Hux pauses, gesturing vaguely. “Wacky alien neighbors.”“Hux…” Kylo gives him a look. “You realize that we’re the wacky alien neighbors, don’t you?”





	

**Author's Note:**

> this is probably the softest thing I’ve written to date, which is saying something.
> 
> a note on chronology: this story takes place between [Trust Me to Take You Home](http://archiveofourown.org/works/7770124) and [Up the Wolves](http://archiveofourown.org/works/8015494), bridging some of the gap between the two fics. if you haven’t read at least the first two installments of [this series](http://archiveofourown.org/series/490429), then this one won’t make any sense!
> 
> blanket content warning for this fic, which focuses on a trans man’s pregnancy. I aimed to treat the subject matter with respect; however, I am not a trans man, nor am I any kind of expert. I apologize in advance for any blunders. if this fic starts to make you feel weird/uncomfortable/etc, feel free to click that back arrow. also, if you have specific triggers, squicks, or sensitivities that you’re worried about, please see the end note for additional content warnings (which contain spoilers). as always, read safely, friends!

_this old machine / has been good to me_  
_all of my life / I have waited for you_  
— [“This Old Machine,”](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l5NOI_JOxmM) Coconut Records

\--

It’s raining when Hux wakes, as it usually is. As he moves to sit up, Kylo’s arm slides around his waist, wordlessly drawing him back into bed. For a moment, Hux allows it. Pressed against him like this, Kylo feels wonderfully warm and inviting. But Hux needs to shower, and then get Shmi dressed and fed, and then open the garage.

“What are you doing?” Hux complains, when Kylo kisses the back of his neck. If Kylo thinks he’s going to sneak in a quick round before breakfast, he’s got another thing coming. “It’s too early for this. I’m really not in the mood—”

Squeezing him around the waist, Kylo says, “You’re pregnant.”

“What?” Awkwardly, Hux twists around in Kylo’s arms so he can see his face. Kylo is smiling broadly at him; in the pale light washing through the window, his eyes are a warmer brown than usual. “You can’t possibly know that.”

“I noticed last night, while you were asleep. I almost woke you up to tell you. It wasn’t developed enough for me to sense it right away, but now—” Kylo presses a hand to Hux’s stomach, gently. “I can feel it, here.”

For a moment, Hux doesn’t react, just considers the possibility.

If Kylo’s right, it would be a relief. Since Hux went off his maintenance injections almost eight months ago, he hasn’t felt quite like himself. Some of that, he knows, is purely psychological—like when he’s paranoid about his own voice, convinced that it sounds different, higher, and Kylo has to continually assure him that it doesn’t.

Other changes can’t be denied, however, such as his body fat redistributing into patterns that remind him of an adolescent he’d rather forget. His face is fuller, too, rounder along the edges, though the worst of it is hidden by his beard. It makes him feel like a stranger in his own skin, like someone he’d decided many years ago that he didn’t want to be. Of course, the hormonal changes will only worsen during a pregnancy. He’s not looking forward to any of it—but the sooner he gets the ordeal underway and finished, the sooner he can resume the testosterone injections and get his body back.

On top of that, having sex almost exclusively for the purposes of reproduction has started to take some of the pleasure out of it. Hux doesn’t want to reach a point where having sex with his husband becomes a chore. Already, whenever they touch, there’s an unspoken pretext. Once they’ve finished, Hux lies there, sweat cooling on his skin, wondering: _Was that it? Did it take this time? Will it ever?_

He and Kylo have agreed to try for one year, and then reassess if they’re unsuccessful. At this point, Hux thinks, in another four months, he may not be willing to continue. If it’s going to happen, it will have to be soon.

“I’m going to take a test,” Hux announces at last, extricating himself from Kylo’s embrace.

Kylo looks wounded. “You don’t believe me?”

“If you say you feel something, whatever that means, I believe you. But I’m not going to leave it up to you to interpret that feeling.”

In the refresher down the hall, Hux closes the door behind him and pulls a palm-sized device out of a cupboard above the sink. On some backwater worlds, urine-based pregnancy tests are standard, but this is nothing so rudimentary. Instead, the device analyzes a small blood sample. Based on hormone levels present in the blood, it can even estimate gestational age, though it’s not exact. All Hux has to do is select the setting for humans and press his thumb into the groove on top of the device.

There’s a brief, sharp sting. The display flashes: _Analyzing sample. Please wait._

Hux drums his fingers along the edge of the sink, expecting nothing. This isn’t the first time he’s used the device; there have been false alarms.

Without the maintenance injections, his cycle has come back, irregularly—an annoyance he hasn’t had to deal with since he was a teenager. A handful of times, Hux has tested himself when his cycle didn’t come, thinking he might’ve conceived since the previous month. But each time, he turned out not to be pregnant, just late.

Maybe it’s the years of hormone therapy that have made his cycle so erratic, or his age, or a combination of factors. Maybe Shmi was a one-time fluke and he’ll never conceive again. He keeps reminding himself not to get his hopes up. He has to be the practical one in this marriage, since Kylo is obviously not up for the task.

The device emits a three-toned chime. Hux looks at the glowing blue display.

_Pregnant. Estimated gestational age: 5 weeks._

For a moment, he just stands there, attempting to process. He’s wondered many times how he would feel at this moment, if indeed it ever came. Now that it’s happening, Hux mostly feels stunned. It doesn’t seem quite real yet, though the evidence is right in front of him. Finally, he’s pregnant. He’s going to have a baby.

He goes back into the bedroom, where Kylo is waiting for him.

\--

“This means we’ll need that droid sooner rather than later,” Hux says, over breakfast. He glances across the table at Kylo. “It’s early yet, but I’d rather have it on-hand.”

“I know,” Kylo agrees. “I’ll talk to Grellif, see if I can… _encourage_ them a bit.”

Hux suspects that “encourage” may imply some type of mind control, but he’s not concerned about the specifics, only the end result.

The need for a medidroid came up early in his discussions with Kylo. For prenatal care, Hux can’t go to the modest medcenter in what passes for downtown; the risk of a standard blood sample getting matched in a criminal database is too high. He can’t deliver in the medcenter, either, for the same reason. There are a handful of midwives in the area, but none are familiar with human anatomy. It’s far from an ideal situation. While Hux has resigned himself to the necessity of giving birth at home, he is not prepared to do so completely unassisted.

The obvious solution was to acquire a medidroid with the right programming. However, medidroids are harder to come by in the Outer Rim than Hux assumed. Fortunately, in the last few years, Kylo has befriended a number of small-time smugglers who frequent Pacifica 9. He’s persuaded them to keep their eyes peeled for a droid that meets Kylo’s specifications when they go off-world, and to bring it back for monetary compensation.

“Are we getting a droid?” Shmi asks, around a mouthful of food, her eyes bright with interest. She’s tall for a human four-year-old, but they still have to put a box on the seat of her chair so she can reach the table easily at mealtime. “What for?”

“Nothing very interesting, princess,” Kylo says, clearly struggling not to smile. “Just to help with boring adult stuff.”

Shmi looks unconvinced. She glances between her fathers, slowly, as if she suspects she’s not being told the whole story.

“Finish your breakfast,” Hux tells her.

Somewhat reluctantly, she does.

\--

They live as normal for the next few weeks, except for the undercurrent of excitement constantly radiating from Kylo. He comes up with any excuse to touch Hux, at work and at home, and especially looks for opportunities to brush his hand across Hux’s completely normal-looking abdomen. It’s annoying, but Hux doesn’t begrudge him his happiness. The baby was Kylo’s idea, after all.

Meanwhile, Hux has become nauseated and sensitive to smell. He feels run-down most days, fatigued, which makes it difficult to work and chase his four-year-old around. He felt much the same way when he was pregnant with Shmi, in the early weeks, though he didn’t recognize the symptoms for what they were. At least Kylo is here to pick up the slack this time.

Despite the symptoms, however, Hux feels remarkably good—or maybe just in good spirits. He’s on track. The plan he and Kylo made is in motion. Finally, after eight months, it’s really happening.

He sometimes catches himself imagining the child, idly wondering if this one will look more like Kylo or more like him—something he’d never allowed himself to do while he was carrying Shmi. Back then, he wasn’t especially curious about the thing developing inside of him. All those months he spent as a prisoner, he tried not to think of it as a baby at all, but as a kind of parasite, an unwanted organism that had inflicted itself upon him. There was no point in getting attached.

The difference, he supposes, is that he can afford to want this baby. He can afford to care, because nobody is going to take it from him.

\--

At the end of the week, Hux notices the spotting. Sudden cold washes over his body at the sight of blood—but some light bleeding isn’t uncommon in early pregnancy, or so he’s read. As long as it doesn’t become a heavy flow, there’s no cause for concern. He puts it from his mind and goes back to work. The spotting will subside on its own.

But it doesn’t. For the next two days, he keeps bleeding—too much to be normal, too much to ignore. He’s also noticed pain in his lower back, disproportionate to any physical activity.

On the third day, when Hux steps into the kitchen, Kylo is at the stove, scrambling an egg for Shmi’s breakfast. She’s seated on the counter—Kylo must’ve placed her there—a safe distance from the hot stovetop, watching the process with interest.

Hux breathes in cautiously, prepared to back out of the room. Lately, the smell of eggs has made him gag—but just now, he finds that he can tolerate it. In fact, he didn’t feel sick at all when he woke today, and he barely felt nauseated yesterday. He hadn’t expected his nausea to abate for several more weeks.

He’s no expert in these matters, not really, but he can do that math.

The rest of the day, he’s distracted, focusing on some hazy next step that never quite materializes. Usually, Hux can see his days and weeks and months stretching out ahead of him in an unbroken line, a series of plans, gears clicking into place. But now, looking ahead, there’s nothing. He feels like he’s been knocked off course.

Rain patters against the small window above the kitchen sink while Hux washes up after dinner. He can hear Shmi playing in the next room, chattering blithely to her cloth dolls. Kylo leans in the doorway behind him; Hux can almost feel Kylo’s eyes on his back.

“I think something is wrong,” Hux announces, scrubbing briskly at a metal dish. From his HoloNet research, he knows that if he’s miscarrying, nothing can be done. He can’t stop it from happening. Keeping it to himself will change nothing. “My symptoms have disappeared, and I’ve been… bleeding. I suspect that I—that I’m having—”

“I know,” Kylo says quietly.

That stops Hux cold. He lets the dishcloth fall into the soapy water and looks over his shoulder. “What do you mean, you know?”

Kylo’s expression is pinched, like something sharp is digging into him. He crosses the kitchen, stopping when he’s almost close enough to touch Hux. “Since last week, I haven’t been able to feel it as clearly,” he admits. “Like its presence is getting weaker. Before, it felt like it was growing, but it’s stopped. And now…”

“What?” Hux’s mouth has gone abruptly dry.

“There’s no heartbeat.”

For a long moment, Hux just stares at him. “But—if you thought—” He shakes his head, both confused and affronted. It’s an effort to keep his voice down. “If you thought something was the matter, why didn’t you say anything? Of all the times not to speak up, Kylo, honestly—”

Kylo’s face crumples. “I wasn’t sure! I didn’t want to scare you if nothing was actually wrong. I thought—I hoped—” He breaks off, his voice thick.

All at once, the entirety of what Kylo said catches up to Hux. It’s like being struck in the face, that momentary delay before the pain actually hits. No heartbeat. “It’s over, then?”

A moment passes. And then, reluctantly, Kylo nods.

“I see,” Hux hears himself say. His own voice sounds like it’s coming from a distance. “All right, then.”

Kylo reaches for him, with both hands, but Hux turns stiffly away. He feels Kylo’s hand brush against his arm, then withdraw.

Taking a deep breath, Hux goes back to scrubbing.

\--

In another life, it would’ve been simple: a trip to medbay, a ten-minute procedure to cleanse him, and back to work in the morning, like nothing ever happened. In this life, however, Hux can’t even go to the medcenter, as the risk of discovery is too high. A medidroid would be helpful at this stage, but there’s no point in wishing for things he can’t have.

As it stands, Hux’s only option is to let the process happen naturally and hope his body knows what to do. While he waits, he keeps busy—working like always, keeping Shmi on her regular routine, researching what he ought to expect as things progress. Kylo looks constantly pained, his jaw tight.

He doesn’t look for excuses to touch Hux anymore.

They don’t talk about the situation, except in the vaguest of terms. If Hux has his way, they’ll never have to.

Somehow, they go on like that for a week, though it feels longer to Hux, each day and night stretching out awfully. Then a cramp wakes him in the middle of the night, sharper than any he’s felt so far.

He sits up, slowly and carefully, and peels back the blanket enough to see that he’s actually soaked through the cloth pad he wore to bed. Typically, he uses a cup during his cycle, but for this process, pads make it easier to monitor how much he’s bleeding. It’s disconcerting to see so much blood on his sleep pants and even the sheet; in the darkness of their bedroom, it looks almost black. But at the same time, it’s a relief—the waiting is over.

Kylo is asleep beside him, facing away, his breathing slow and regular. For a while, Hux doesn’t move to get up. If he wakes Kylo just now, he’ll have to deal with him—so he stays put, breathing hard through his nose while he waits for the cramp to pass. His skin feels uncomfortably hot, slightly tacky with sweat.

Another cramp twists his insides. The pains are coming in waves: rhythmic, almost, with breaks in between. Belatedly, when a few intense cramps have come and gone, Hux realizes that he’s having contractions. He almost wants to laugh at the cruel absurdity of it.

Finally, in a lull between cramps, he eases himself out of bed. He’s barely straightened up when the mattress creaks and Kylo’s hand curls around his wrist, a loose grip.

“Go back to sleep,” Hux mutters. He refuses to look behind him.

Kylo’s grip tightens. “Are you kidding? Hux—”

“I don’t need you for this,” Hux says, shaper than he’d meant to. “Give me some karking privacy.”

Wrenching himself out of Kylo’s grasp, he pads out of the bedroom and locks himself in the refresher.

\--

Hux isn’t sure how long it takes. A few hours, he guesses, but time seems to spiral out in different directions.

At some point—he doesn’t quite remember when—he finds himself in the empty bathtub, stripped below the waist, sweating and shaking and cursing under his breath. It would probably be more comfortable to sit on the toilet, but that seems inappropriate to him somehow.

The pain is familiar and relentless. It seems unfair, considering he won’t get anything out of this ordeal. At the end, there won’t be any baby as a reward.

To his credit, Kylo never forces the door open. Now and then, he calls out to ask Hux how he’s doing—in a hushed voice, so as not to wake Shmi—but beyond that, he leaves Hux to his own devices. Hux suspects that Kylo has been lurking around outside the door all this time, but that’s Kylo’s choice, for good or ill.

Eventually, when he feels that the worst is over, Hux sends Kylo to gather a fresh set of clothes for him, including underwear. He cracks the door open to accept the clothes. Only when he’s cleaned himself up and dressed does he admit Kylo. Neither of them seems to know quite where to look.

“What do you want to do with it?” Kylo asks, in a low voice.

For a moment, Hux doesn’t know what he’s talking about. Then he notices how Kylo’s dark eyes flicker toward the tub, blocked by the opaque shower curtain, and it dawns on him: the remains. It’s a red mess of blood clots and tissue that Hux passed painfully over the last few hours, nothing remotely recognizable. Hux knows—he looked, compelled by an urge he didn’t understand, though it almost made him sick. There was so much blood.

“Dispose of it,” Hux says at last, numbly. He can feel his pulse in the back of his throat. That had been his initial thought, when he climbed into the tub: If it happened there, he could just rinse the evidence away. “What else?”

Kylo spent so many years hidden under a mask that he never learned how to control his expressions; at Hux’s words, his face spasms into a blend of horror and disgust. “That’s our baby,” he says, voice jumping. “We’re not throwing our baby away—”

“It’s not—it wasn’t—” _It wasn_ _’t a baby yet,_ Hux wants to say. _At most, it was an embryo._ But he knows that won’t matter to Kylo, and he doesn’t have the strength for an argument right now. Instead, he says, “I can’t touch it.”

“You won’t have to. I’ll take care of it.”

Hux is too tired to ask what Kylo intends to do. He just takes a bottle of analgesics from the medicine cabinet above the sink, swallows three pills dry, and goes back into their darkened bedroom. His legs feel rubbery as he lowers himself onto the mattress.

Kylo appears in the doorway. For a moment, he doesn’t say anything, just looks at Hux grimly. At last, he says, “What do you need?”

“Come back to bed,” Hux mutters, rolling onto his side. He lets his eyes drift shut. The darkness there is peaceful. “We have to get up in an hour as it is.”

“You’re not working today,” Kylo says immediately. “You’re going to rest. And I’m going to close the garage for the day so I can—”

Hux’s eyes blink open. He levels the sharpest look he can muster at Kylo. “No. Absolutely not. I won’t have you make a big production out of this. Just go downstairs and go to work.”

“You shouldn’t be alone right now.”

“I’m not about to keel over. I don’t need to be _supervised_ ,” Hux says, with a weary irritation. Then he lets out a slow breath. “Will you come to bed?”

Kylo hesitates. He takes a half-step toward the bed, one hand lingering on the door frame. Then he leaves. Hux can hear him puttering around in the refresher, along with the sound of running water. For what feels like a long time, Hux teeters on the edge of sleep, never quite getting there.

An hour later, when Shmi wakes up, it’s Kylo who makes sure she’s washed and dressed and fed. He tries to talk Hux into joining the two of them for breakfast in the kitchen, but Hux refuses. He’s so tired.

To his surprise, Kylo doesn’t fight him too hard on the issue, just perches on the edge of the mattress. He’s close enough to touch Hux, though he doesn’t. “I’ll come check on you in a few hours.”

“There’s no need.”

Kylo just leans down, presses a dry kiss to Hux’s temple, and slips out of the bedroom in silence.

Hux hears the front door open and close, and then Kylo’s footsteps on the stairs, heading down. He wishes he could get up and go to work himself, but Kylo’s right—he’s in no condition for physical work just now. He’ll take the day off. Tomorrow, surely, he’ll feel more like himself. Tomorrow, he can get back to normal.

\--

When Hux opens his eyes, Shmi has crawled into bed with him. Somehow, she managed to cuddle up against his chest, under the rumpled blanket, without him noticing.

Kriff. He doesn’t even remember falling asleep. A glance at the bedside chrono tells him that it’s already past time for Shmi’s midmorning lesson. It’s not proper schoolwork, really, but activities meant to ease her into structured learning. Hux would hate to disrupt her routine just because he’s feeling poorly—but if they have to skip the lessons for today, he supposes she won’t lose too much progress.

For a while, he just watches her sleep, her eyelids twitching gently in a dream. Sometimes he’s astonished by how much she resembles Kylo: dark-haired and dark-eyed, big ears and an angular nose. There’s nothing at all of Hux in her face. He doesn’t know what she’s inherited from him—maybe nothing that counts. And maybe that’s for the best.

He hauls himself out of bed when Shmi wakes up, around the same time that Kylo comes upstairs—for lunch, ostensibly, but also to check on Hux. With Shmi underfoot and always listening, Kylo doesn’t dare to ask Hux anything more specific than what he wants to eat.

Hux has no preference and again declines any food. To avoid the look Kylo’s giving him, as well as any potential conversation, he ducks into the refresher while Shmi and Kylo sit at the kitchen table. He needs to attend to himself again, anyway; the bleeding hasn’t stopped.

The mess in the tub is gone, he notices, all traces of what happened there washed down the drain. Suddenly, Hux is ashamed that Kylo not only saw it—all that blood—but apparently cleaned it up. That must be what Kylo was doing when he didn’t come back to bed.

Eventually, Kylo goes back downstairs. Hux settles on the couch, where he can monitor Shmi more easily, a heating pad resting on his pelvis. He’s still cramping intermittently, though the pain is less intense than before, more like what he associates with his regular cycle.

Shmi brings his datapad to him at one point, a hopeful expression on her face. It’s already queued up to a particular document. She is still enamored with Grand Admiral Thrawn, and among his many notable exploits, one of her favorites happens to involve Luke Skywalker.

In hindsight, Hux thinks it may have been a mistake to introduce her to this particular story so early. Anything to do with lightsabers or the Force excites her, and she’s shown great interest in Skywalker.

She knows that he is her great-uncle, though she’s too young to fully grasp what that means. Likewise, she’s been told about her grandparents and great-grandparents, in the simplest possible terms. It doesn’t mean much to her yet, but Hux and Kylo agreed it was best to introduce these things gradually, as she began to ask about them, instead of dodging her questions.

Kylo’s family had planned to reveal the truth about his bloodline when he was old enough to hear it, but they waited much too long. From that mistake, Kylo and Hux have learned that there is no such thing as _old enough,_ not in matters such as these. Better to tell Shmi the truth from a young age and explain in more detail as she grows up.

Shmi clambers up onto the couch and nestles against Hux’s side. Her dark eyes follow the scrolling text as he reads aloud; occasionally, he asks her to read a word or a sentence, helping her work through the syllables.

Unexpectedly, another cramp makes him stumble over his words. He resumes quickly, hoping Shmi didn’t notice the interruption, or the way his breathing has quickened. But he’s not that lucky.

She looks up at him, her brow pinched in childlike concern. “Daddy, are you sick?”

“No, darling. I’m a little tired today, that’s all,” Hux tells her. He reaches up to brush a few strands of dark hair away from her eyes. “I’ll feel better tomorrow. Now, what sound does a lightsaber make? I’ve quite forgotten.”

“Papa’s lightsaber makes a noise like—” Shmi gives a blustering impression of the whoosh-and-hum.

She’s seen Kylo’s weapon a few times—always from a safe distance, at Hux’s insistence. The red glow instantly entranced her. Kylo says she’ll build her own lightsaber someday, when she’s had enough training, but Hux can’t imagine her wielding one. Or maybe he just doesn’t like the idea.

Hux does not pretend to understand the ways of the Force; it’s beyond him. Sometimes he fears that he’ll wake up one day and find that his Force-sensitive child has become a stranger to him, incomprehensible. He has no intention of repeating Han Solo’s mistakes. If the old smuggler was good for anything, Hux thinks grimly, it was to set an example of what not to do.

That’s a conversation he ought to have with Kylo, sooner rather than later. For now, he just absently kisses Shmi’s temple and continues to read.

\--

The rain has picked up when Kylo reappears, hours before Hux had expected him. Shmi abandons her toys on the sitting-room rug and bolts to the door to meet him, before he can even get his boots off.

“I closed up early,” Kylo says, by way of greeting, and scoops Shmi up with ease.

Hux’s mouth thins. “I specifically told you not to.”

“You should lie down,” Kylo goes on, as if Hux hadn’t spoken. He’s dangling Shmi upside-down now, almost casually, his hands on her ankles, while she shrieks with delight. “You look tired.”

On basic principle, Hux puts up some halfhearted protests. But in the end, he allows Kylo to badger him into going back to bed. Hux undresses in the semidarkness of their bedroom, and it’s only when he lies down that he realizes how exhausted he is, like all the strength has been drained out of him.

From across the apartment, Hux can make out the smell of food, though he can’t identify whatever Kylo threw together for dinner. And later, he hears the familiar sounds of Kylo playing with Shmi: thumping and mock-growling and Shmi’s breathless laughter.

It’s good that she’s laughing. She has no idea that anything is amiss.

Gradually, things quiet down. The bedroom door creaks open sometime later, and Kylo slips inside carrying a big glass of water in one hand and a faintly-steaming bowl in the other. It’s soup—rice and meat in broth, the old standby. Sitting up, Hux accepts the glass without comment. He takes a few swallows and moves to set it aside, but Kylo catches his wrist.

“Drink,” Kylo says firmly. “You’re dehydrated.”

They stare hard at each other for a moment, neither one budging. Hux cracks first, downing the rest of the water, with Kylo’s hand still molded around his wrist, more loosely now. It’s easier to relent than to argue.

“I’m going to put Shmi to bed,” Kylo says. He takes the empty glass from Hux and replaces it with the bowl. “Eat while I’m gone.”

Hux does not immediately comply. But in the end, he forces himself to eat. He knows he has to. Each spoonful seems like a great effort, more trouble than it’s worth; he only manages to down about half of the soup. He places the bowl on the nightstand and lies back down, feeling somehow more exhausted then before.

Before Kylo returns, Hux falls into an exhausted sleep.

\--

The sound of someone quietly choking wakes him. Hux rolls over, bleary, and searches for the source of the noise. In the dark beside him, Kylo is shuddering.

Hux reaches over to switch on the bedside lamp, then fumbles to lower it to ten percent. He squints at Kylo. “What are you doing?”

Kylo looks up at him with red-rimmed eyes. His face is ashen, his hair tangled from restless sleep. Perhaps he hasn’t slept at all. “I can’t stop thinking about it,” he says, thickly, and his face crumples again. At least he presses a hand to his mouth to muffle the sound of his crying.

For a moment, Hux just stares at him. Maybe he should be impressed that Kylo has held it together all day, only cracking now, when they’re alone—though he supposes it’s possible that Kylo had some kind of nervous breakdown in the garage. He sincerely hopes that nothing like that happened. A weeping mechanic can only be bad for business.

“It’s the middle of the night, Kylo. I am exhausted. I do not have the energy to _comfort_ you right now,” Hux says, through his teeth, which does nothing to stop Kylo’s broken sobbing. In that moment, Hux hates him—for making such pitiful noises, for looking so miserable, for forcing Hux deal with his emotions on top of everything else. “For pity’s sake, stop crying. If you need to compose yourself, do it in the refresher. I can’t—”

“It was a boy,” Kylo says hoarsely. His eyes are screwed shut in what looks like pain. “I could sense him before, in the beginning. I was waiting to tell you. He would’ve been a boy.”

Hux feels like the air has been sucked out of his lungs. It takes him a moment to get his voice working. “Why did you say that?” he demands, in a harsh whisper. His own pulse pounds in his ears like a hollow drum. When Kylo doesn’t answer, Hux grabs his arm and squeezes hard enough to hurt. “Why would you tell me that _now?_ I didn’t want to know, you bastard—”

“Why not? It’s true. Do you even want to know where I buried him?”

“No,” Hux says immediately. He wants to hit Kylo, suddenly, in retaliation: a sharp, hard pain to match the one he’s feeling right now, deep in his chest. “Don’t you dare tell me.”

Kylo doesn’t. He continues to cry, messily, still making the awful choking noise, one hand clamped over his mouth. Hux doesn’t hit him. In fact, the urge to hurt Kylo bleeds out of him surprisingly fast, leaving nothing but a bone-deep exhaustion. Ultimately, Hux does what he always does in times like this: He strokes Kylo’s hair and lets him wear himself out.

 _Our baby,_ Kylo had called the blood and tissue, when Hux couldn’t bear to think of it that way. _Our baby._

And if Hux hadn’t lost it: their son.

But he can’t bear to think of that, either. Not tonight.

When Kylo finally subsides, Hux rolls over and shuts off the light. It’s a relief to be in darkness; his eyes ache dully.

The mattress creaks, and Hux lets Kylo wrap himself around him, molding himself along Hux’s back. Eventually, he falls back into a restless sleep.

\--

Dawn comes, pale and cold. Hux hauls himself out of bed. He’s tired and sore, but he feels well enough to work, and to give Shmi her lessons, and to attend to his household responsibilities, no matter how Kylo keeps badgering him to go lie down.

Within a week, the cramps subside and the bleeding stops, and he knows that the process is complete. He’s back at the start again—as if he were never pregnant to begin with, as if nothing ever happened.

He carries on like normal, because he has to. Any odd behavior would only confuse and upset Shmi. She doesn’t need to see him in a state of distress. She has no idea that he was ever expecting, and he refuses to burden her with the knowledge that her potential sibling has died. Better if she goes the rest of her life without suspecting. This is one secret he can keep.

Sometimes Kylo asks him clumsy questions: _How are you? What do you need? What can I do?_

Hux knows what Kylo is really asking and he doesn’t care for it. When pressed, he discusses only his physical recovery—whether he’s feeling pain or discomfort, nothing more. He is careful to keep his language clear and clinical. There’s no room for anything as messy and imprecise as emotion.

\--

If nothing else, Hux is a practical man.

Statistically speaking, around twenty percent of human pregnancies end in miscarriage. He understood from the beginning that he might lose the pregnancy. These things just happen sometimes, for no particular reason. Nothing he did or didn’t do caused him to miscarry. Hux knows all this, in theory.

Reality is a different beast. He could never have anticipated the sense of failure that washes over him each time he thinks of what happened—and he thinks of it almost daily. His body has let him down in an irreparable way.

Hux reminds himself that he shouldn’t feel so despondent over what, at that stage, basically amounted to a clump of cells. It was just an embryo. He saw what remained of it—blood and tissue. It wasn’t even a baby yet.

But it would’ve been, if he hadn’t lost it. And it would’ve been a boy. He still wishes Kylo hadn’t told him that much.

As the weeks pass, Kylo is unashamed to tell Hux how desperately he had wanted the baby. He’d loved it already, which Hux thinks was a mistake. If Kylo had only been more guarded, he wouldn’t be suffering quite so much now.

They lie in bed some nights, rain whispering against the roof, while Kylo talks about the future he’d envisioned for their family, one that won’t ever be complete. He tells Hux of his deep sorrow at the loss. Sometimes, he cries.

Hux doesn’t know how much longer he can stand it.

He had wanted the baby, too—more than he’s willing to admit, more than was safe. Now he regrets planning how they’d rearrange Shmi’s bedroom to accommodate a crib, and sorting through some of Shmi’s old clothes, and idly wondering what the baby might look like. He had been arrogant to look so far ahead and assume nothing would go wrong.

In a way, it serves him right to have lost it, like a punishment for his conceit. But he can’t tell Kylo any of that. Instead, he keeps it to himself, shoved down someplace beneath his ribs, where it belongs.

\--

The mattress dips and creaks familiarly under Kylo’s weight as he climbs into bed beside Hux. Their bed isn’t especially large, especially not for two men of their height, yet they manage not to touch.

There was a time when Hux would wake in the middle of the night feeling suffocated and too warm, because Kylo was practically molded to him, pressed against his back, their legs tangled. But since the miscarriage, Kylo has made no attempts to initiate any kind of physical intimacy. It’s just as well—the way Hux has been feeling, he’d violently resist any overtures.

And yet, at the same time, the situation is worrying. Sex aside, they haven’t so much as kissed on the mouth in weeks. It’s like they can’t bear the feeling of each other’s skin.

Hux can’t tell if Kylo isn’t touching him because of Kylo’s own miserably emotional state, or because Hux has become entirely unappealing to him. It’s probably the latter. By any standard, Hux is an abject disappointment of a partner. If he were Kylo, he wouldn’t want himself, either.

“What are we going to tell Shmi?” Kylo asks, in a low voice, when the lights are off. “Not now. I mean, in the future, if she asks why we never gave her a sibling.”

“She probably won’t ask,” Hux mutters. He doesn’t open his eyes, hoping that Kylo will let the subject drop, if only for tonight. “She’s perfectly happy as it is.”

“For now. But if she ever wonders, I think we should be honest. We should just tell her that she had a brother, but he—”

Somehow, that’s the last straw. Hux cannot endure another moment. He sits up, shoving the blanket back, and slaps the bedside lamp so that it gives off a faint glow, just enough to see by. “I’ve been listening to you carry on about this for weeks,” he says, so sharply that Kylo looks almost taken aback. “I don’t want to hear any more tonight. For pity’s sake, just let me sleep.”

For a moment, Kylo just stares at him with those big, dark, cow eyes of his. And then his jaw tightens, his mouth thinning to a pale slash as he sits up. “No matter how long you ignore it, that won’t make it go away,” he says. “You realize that, don’t you?”

“I am in no mood to discuss this tonight,” Hux presses, enunciating clearly.

“Of course not.” Kylo’s tone is sour. “You never are. Not yesterday, and not tonight, and probably not tomorrow—”

At that, Hux feels himself bristle. “And here I was, thinking I just haven’t made myself clear,” he said. “But apparently, you’re being intentionally obtuse. For the last time, I don’t want to discuss it—”

“That’s the difference, isn’t it? I need to talk about it.”

“Ye gods, you and your _needs_ again,” Hux says, witheringly, before he can even think to stop himself. Really, this has been simmering for weeks. “I cannot tell you how sick I am of this wounded routine of yours. This didn’t only happen to you, Kylo. You’re not the only affected party here—”

“Could’ve fooled me! You’ve been acting like it didn’t even happen.”

“Would you prefer me to wander around, weeping?” Hux can’t help but sneer. It feels uncharitable, and possibly cruel, to throw the words at Kylo like this, but he can’t bring himself to care. “Would that be enough of a display to satisfy you?”

Suddenly, Kylo’s expression darkens into anger. “How can you be so fucking glib?” he demands. “We lost our child. And you’re brushing it off, acting like everything’s normal—”

“Tell me how I ought to behave, then!” Hux’s voice is rising, and he struggles to force it back down. He doesn’t want to wake Shmi. “Really, Kylo, tell me, since you’re the great arbiter of human emotion—”

“At least I _have_ emotions,” Kylo says viciously. “Do you even care, Hux? Do you feel anything at all? Talking to you is like a one-way transmission. I get _nothing_ back—”

“You’re not the one who had something die inside of you!” It comes out as a shout, loud enough that they both wince. Hux takes a ragged breath and makes an effort to lower his voice. “How can you begin to grasp what that’s like? I have nothing to say. And if I did, you wouldn’t understand.”

A long moment passes. They don’t quite look at each other. Rain drums against the roof, steady and sullen; somehow, Hux didn’t notice until just now.

“I wanted it just as much as you did,” he says at last. His throat feels tight, and his pulse echoes shallowly in his ears. “But I don’t have the luxury of falling to pieces whenever I feel a twinge. I have to get on with things.”

Kylo stares at him. “Get on with things?”

“We both do. You can’t go on like this forever. You have to put it behind you.”

“It doesn’t work like that,” Kylo says, shaking his head.

“Well, it ought to!” Hux snaps. It ended when the heartbeat stopped, and ended again when he stopped bleeding—and yet it’s still not over, not really, not for him. It feels like it’s happening all the time. He doesn’t understand how that can be. “I want to be done with it. I want to stop _thinking_ about it ten times a day—”

“You can’t do that until you deal with it,” Kylo insists. He leans closer, but he doesn’t reach for Hux. In the low light, his eyes are very dark. “Repression doesn’t work. You have to allow yourself to feel whatever it is that you feel. You have to accept it and let it pass through you before you can move forward.”

Hux gives a watery scoff. “What is that, some kind of Jedi claptrap?”

“Not at all.” Kylo’s voice is completely earnest. “One of the core principles of the Jedi Order was that you mustn’t feel anything too deeply—not grief, not anger, not love. They saw emotion as a slippery slope that led to the dark side. You had to crush it, control it, so it wouldn’t consume you. My old master…”

“Luke Skywalker,” Hux says, pointedly. Kylo tends to dance around the subject, but Hux prefers a more direct approach. “Your uncle.”

Grimacing, Kylo concedes, “My uncle. He didn’t adhere to the old ways. He encouraged attachments of all kinds. He was weak and foolish in many regards—but in that one way, he was at least better than the Jedi who came before him.”

“Well, I’m not like that. You know I’m not. I wasn’t raised on some Jedi commune, where we sat around and talked about our feelings.” Even now, the mere thought of baring himself like that, exposing his weak spots, is faintly repulsive to Hux. When his clears his throat, his voice is still thick. “I lie here every night, listening to you go on about how miserable you are because I lost the baby. But what am I supposed to do about that? What do you want me to say? I feel guilty enough without you reminding me constantly.”

“Hux…” Kylo blanches. “I don’t—I don’t _blame_ you for it. Is that what you think? You didn’t do anything wrong—”

“I _know_ that,” Hux says, a bit crossly—not with Kylo, but with himself. He hates feeling this way, spinning in circles all day, getting nowhere. “It’s completely irrational. I know I couldn’t have caused it. But I keep thinking—what if I hadn’t carried all those crates the week before it happened? What if I’d gotten more sleep? What if I’d done anything differently? And I thought you were thinking it, too.”

“What? Why?”

“You never touch me.”

Kylo is quiet for a moment. “I didn’t mean to give you that impression,” he says, slowly, like he’s choosing his words with caution. “I just thought it would be better if I stayed… hands-off, for a while.”

“For what purpose?”

“The first few days, you kept shoving me off you,” Kylo points out. That much is true, Hux recalls. He didn’t want to be touched then, in any way, and Kylo’s presence felt like too much. “I didn’t want you to think I was trying to get you pregnant again or something. And then, when a little time had passed, it felt like it was too late to say anything. I thought you’d let me know when you were ready.” He looks plaintive, almost. “You always do.”

“Yes, well—” Hux takes a breath, trying not to squirm under the intensity of Kylo’s gaze. He feels vaguely pathetic, but at least he doesn’t think Kylo sees him that way. “It may not be entirely too late.”

That’s all the invitation Kylo needs.

He slides across the bed, closing the narrow space between them. Hux allows himself to be folded into Kylo’s arms, to be drawn down onto the bed. Somehow, the light shuts off without Kylo touching the device—the Force, presumably. The sudden darkness is peaceful.

And then Hux feels the tightness in his throat, the prickling in his eyes. Stars, he doesn’t want this to happen.

The first sob comes out as more of a gasp, and he thinks he might be able to hold the rest in. Then he feels another sob rising in his chest, and another, messy and almost painful, punching their way out of him.

“You don’t have to be all right,” he hears Kylo say, so quietly. “And you can let me see it, if you’re not. You know that, don’t you?”

Hux shudders. Trying to suppress the sobbing just makes it worse—and so he lets it come.

He tells himself that this is his choice: to allow the feeling to pass through him, as Kylo would say, and leave him in peace. All the while, he feels Kylo’s arm around him, and Kylo’s hand on his back, steadying him.

It lasts either a minute or an hour. Hux has no idea. But by the time it’s over, he feels exhausted.

They just hold each other for a while after that. The only sound is the rain on the roof and the two of them breathing.

It’s a weakness, Hux knows, how much he’s come to rely on Kylo, how much he needs him. He’s never given anyone else this kind of power. But at least it’s a weakness that he knows Kylo shares. They yielded completely to each other, a long time ago.

\--

Hux does not feel particularly well-rested in the morning. He wakes with the beginning of a headache, throbbing dully behind his eyes. But he wakes in Kylo’s arms—the way he’d gotten used to, the way he’d missed—and that means something.

He feels lighter somehow, in a way he could not have anticipated. His head is clearer at work, and when he lies in bed with Kylo that night, he’s not suffocated by everything he won’t allow himself to say. It feels like the beginning of getting back to normal life.

Days pass, melting into weeks. Eventually, Hux lets Kylo tell him where he buried the remains—a wooded area beyond the city, a fairly short trip by speeder—but he doesn’t visit himself. He doesn’t feel the need. He doubts he ever will, though he doesn’t begrudge Kylo the occasional outing. A long time ago, he gave up on fully understanding Kylo Ren. Now he just tries to accept him.

As if they’ve passed through some invisible barrier, they can touch again. It’s easier to sleep in the same bed, to brush against each other throughout the day, to kiss casually. Their intimacy is limited to hands and mouths, however. An unspoken understanding seems to hang between them. In Hux’s opinion, it’s because they’ve both come to associate a particular type of intimacy with baby-making. Maybe it was inevitable. The act is loaded now, in a way that it wasn’t before.

Kylo has yet to broach the subject of trying to conceive again. Hux suspects this is an effort to be sensitive to his feelings, which is both vaguely insulting—he’s not _that_ delicate—and vaguely endearing.

He would bring it up himself, except he’s unsure of what he really wants. He hasn’t gone back on his injections yet. In fact, his ridiculous, irregular cycle came back a few weeks ago. Theoretically, he could get pregnant again. He just doesn’t know if he should.

It’s not raining for once when they go to bed, but only because it’s too cold. Instead of an endless drumming against the roof, the only sound is their breathing and the rustling of blankets. Hux and Kylo went to bed like normal, but somehow, a bit of incidental fondling eased into something more. Now they’re tangled up in the blankets, struggling to undress each other, unwilling to expose themselves to the cold air.

“Your hands are freezing,” Kylo complains, between kisses. They’re on their sides, pressed together at chest and knees.

“Don’t worry, they’ll warm up,” Hux replies. He wedges one hand between them and slides the other along Kylo’s side and across his solid back, enjoying the way Kylo shivers under his touch.

The mattress creaks in protest as Kylo attempts to shimmy out of his own sleep pants and then kick them out from under the blanket and onto the floor. He ends up kicking Hux instead. “Shit, I’m sorry—”

“That hurt, you beast,” Hux says, but he’s laughing.

Kylo huffs, and then they’re laughing together, hands and mouths still brushing in different places: throat, shoulders, hips. Hux doesn’t think he ever laughed in bed with anyone before Kylo. Somehow, he never realized that until just now.

Hux rolls over so that Kylo is on his back, then slides on top of him, their hips slotted together. In this position, Hux thinks, Kylo can have no doubt about what he wants.

Sure enough, a moment later, Kylo reaches toward the nightstand: for the drawer that contains a stash of barriers, untouched for many months now.

Hux catches his wrist. “You won’t be needing those.”

A moment passes. Kylo studies him for a moment, his eyes dark. “Are you sure?”

It’s a fair question. For weeks, Hux couldn’t decide if another attempt would be worth the effort and emotional investment, if all he gets out of it is a few weeks of nausea and another miscarriage. In the end, he says: “Do you think I became a general by giving up at the first sign of difficulty?”

“No,” Kylo says slowly. One big hand slides up Hux’s thigh to rest on his hip, thumb rubbing circles against the bone. “But maybe we should—”

“And is that how you became the master of the Knights of Ren—by quitting whenever you did not immediately succeed?”

A huff escapes Kylo. “No.”

“That’s what I thought.” Hux rolls his hips in a slow circle. Kylo’s breath hitches, just a little, and Hux keeps moving his pelvis, gentle but steady. “Now, I want you to help me make another baby. Have I made myself clear?”

Kylo’s eyes have gone very dark. He’s looking at Hux like he’s never seen him before—but, no, that’s not right. He’s looking at Hux the way he used to, when they were co-commanders and Hux always knew the way ahead. It’s been ages since Hux felt that kind of bone-deep certainty, but he feels it now.

“Is that an order, General?” Kylo asks.

Hux leans down to kiss him. “It most certainly is.”

\--

They’ve been actively trying for a few weeks when Kylo presents Hux with the droid. One of Kylo’s smuggler acquaintances finally came through, and managed to get their hands on a cast-off droid from a birth center on a Mid-Rim world.

Hux looks the droid up and down. It’s small, about as tall as Hux’s chest, all chipped white enamel and pale blue accents, with incongruous synthskin hands. It has the round, minimalist face that’s common among medidroids, with blue eye-lights just expressive enough to convey programmed emotion.

Aside from a few dings and dents, it seems to be in good condition. Still, Hux can’t help but wonder why it was available for such a reasonable price. Medidroids of any type are a precious resource in the Outer Rim; most people guard theirs jealously.

“Is it defective?” he asks Kylo.

The droid gasps, as if offended. “Certainly not, sir!”

“She’s just an older model that was retired when they came out with a newer one,” Kylo explains. “She got shuffled around for a while after that. A few generations old, but everything’s in working order. Think of her as seasoned.”

“I am OB-2790, obstetrics and midwifery unit,” the droid natters. It has a calm, pleasantly neutral voice. “It will be my pleasure to care for you and your baby.”

Hux frowns critically. “How experienced are you with human anatomy?”

“Very experienced, sir,” the droid assures him. “During my time at the birth center, I attended many human patients. In addition to my practical experience, my programming is extensive.”

Another moment passes while Hux considers. But in the end, he nods. An out-of-date medidroid is better than nothing at all. Surely the mechanics of childbirth haven’t changed much in the last two decades or so. “All right,” he says. “It will do.”

The droid seems eager to get to work. Right away, it draws blood from both Hux and Kylo and stows the vials in an internal compartment. It also insists on another sample from Kylo, to be collected later. While the droid analyzes the blood samples, it quizzes both of them about their medical histories.

“And how long have you been trying to conceive?” asks OB-2790 eventually.

“Approximately one year,” Hux says. He clears his throat. “I did become pregnant about three months ago, but I miscarried.”

The droid’s eye-lights dim in programmed sympathy. “I am very sorry for your loss,” it says—an automatic response to a key phrase, Hux assumes. “However, the fact that you conceived at all is a good sign. Based on my readings, I estimate a twenty-five percent chance of you conceiving naturally again—about average for a human of your age.”

Hux is relieved when the conversation turns away from the miscarriage; he still doesn’t like to discuss it. But later that night, while Kylo is giving Shmi a bath, Hux corrals the droid into the kitchen for a private consultation.

In a low voice, he says, “I have… concerns, about a potential pregnancy.”

OB-2790’s eye-lights brighten. “I would be happy to discuss your concerns and answer any questions,” it says immediately. “Shall I ask your husband to sit down with us, as well?”

“No,” Hux says, too quickly. He coughs a little into his hand. “No, that won’t be necessary. But—in your professional opinion, knowing what you do about my health and medical history, how likely am I to miscarry again?”

The eye-lights droop. “That is difficult to determine, I’m afraid,” it says fretfully. “Unless there is an underlying medical issue, miscarriages are not usually predictable, or preventable. Most often, a miscarriage occurs because the embryo is not viable—there might be a chromosomal abnormality, for example, which makes the embryo incompatible with life.”

“I wondered if perhaps my age was a factor,” Hux admits, the back of his neck prickling with heat. He hasn’t shared these concerns with Kylo, but surely Kylo has had the same thoughts. They’ve been at this for a year already. Hux has turned forty, which the HoloNet suggests is something of a death knell for childbearing prospects. It’s all downhill from here. “Or the hormone therapy.”

A moment passes while the droid considers, possibly consulting some internal medical database. “You stated previously that your last testosterone injection was eight months before you became pregnant,” it says at last. “Excessive amounts would not have been present in your body at the time of the miscarriage. Also, your previous healthy pregnancy suggests the hormone therapy has not seriously impacted your reproductive system.” The eye-lights tilt thoughtfully. “As for your age, the eggs released by your ovaries do have a higher chance of chromosomal abnormality now than when you were younger. This increases the risk of miscarriage. It’s unavoidable, unless you were to become pregnant using donor eggs.”

“So, essentially—there’s nothing that can be done to keep it from happening again?” Hux asks.

OB-2790 shakes its round head. “At this point, no. If you were to miscarry multiple times in a row, that could indicate a hormonal or anatomical issue. Short of that, I’m sorry to say, there is simply no way to know.”

“I see.” Hux makes an effort to keep the frustration out of his voice. He had hoped for a more illuminating answer, and perhaps a solution—but the droid is right. There’s nothing that can be done. “Thank you, OB-2790. That will be all for now.”

\--

It takes almost four more months, but it happens. Once again, Kylo has a feeling through the Force—and once again, Hux tests positive.

The last time this happened, he had felt relief, and then a sense of anticipation, even excitement. But now, looking down at the glowing display, all he feels is a coiling dread. He’s pregnant now, but he might not stay that way. He doesn’t want to look ahead if it just means another disappointment.

Kylo smiles when Hux shows him the readout, but there’s a tightness around his mouth and eyes that wasn’t there last time. He’s undoubtedly echoing Hux’s own thoughts.

A few hours later, when he feels less jittery, Hux consults with OB-2790. Shmi has become attached the droid over the last few months, ever since it became her regular babysitter. She calls it “Obie” for short; oddly, Kylo found this hilarious and has followed her lead.

It feels odd to Hux. He’s never used a nickname for a droid, not even the nanny droid who did the bulk of the work raising him. But Shmi tends to anthromorphize droids—at least, the models that talk. She doesn’t like to hear Hux call OB-2790 by its full designation, and even complains when he refers to the droid as “it.” And so he’s made some concessions.

Obie suggests a scan to determine precise gestational age. When Shmi has been put to bed that night, Hux submits himself for examination.

The droid’s age shows in her scanner capabilities: She has to actually touch the scanner to Hux’s abdomen to get an accurate reading. At least it’s noninvasive. He lies back on the bed he shares with Kylo, his shirt pushed up to his ribs and his eyes trained on the ceiling while he waits. Obie stands beside the bed, slowly passing the scanner back and forth; Kylo perches on the mattress, at Hux’s other side.

He remembers going through this process when he was carrying Shmi. He never looked at those scans; he hadn’t wanted to see whatever was developing inside of him. Getting attached was too great a risk. In a way, it still is.

“And there’s your baby,” Obie says brightly. Her eye-lights gleam.

Hux hesitates. Then he glances at the small console linked to the scanner, which is propped up on the bedside table.

Sure enough, a shadowy image has resolved itself on the display, magnified many times over to show detail. Kylo gasps a little. Without taking his eyes off the scan, he fumbles for Hux’s hand and squeezes. Absently, Hux squeezes back.

It looks so small, a speck in a dark sea, not yet recognizably human. Based on the embryo’s size—only a few millimeters from end to end—Obie estimates that Hux is six and a half weeks along.

Hux had wondered if he would feel something at this moment, some surge of emotion when he saw his child for the first time—and indeed, there’s something stirring in his chest. But it’s chased by the familiar fear that this won’t last.

“Just one?” Hux asks cautiously.

“That’s right,” Obie says.

Good. Kylo has been hoping for twins—stars, Hux has come to loathe Darth Vader—and, worryingly, statistics have been on his side. Once a human passes the age of forty, the likelihood of naturally conceiving twins rises considerably. No matter how thrilled Kylo would be at the prospect, however, Hux doesn’t think he could cope with carrying multiples. One baby is plenty.

It takes him a moment to gather the nerve for his next question. He braces himself. “Does it look healthy?”

“Oh, yes. Everything looks perfectly normal. And see here—” Magnifying the display further, Obie indicates a small, steady flutter. “That’s a good, strong heartbeat. Would you like to hear it?”

“Yes,” Kylo says immediately.

Obie fusses with the scanner settings, and then the console emits a sound: a low, rhythmic whooshing.

“That’s the baby?” Hux can’t quite believe it.

“Yes, sir.”

“Oh.” All at once, listening to whoosh, Hux is overwhelmed. The baby is real to him—frighteningly so. If he loses this one, too, he doesn’t know how he’ll manage.

Kylo squeezes Hux’s hand again. “It’ll be all right,” he says quietly, as if skimming Hux’s mind. Then again, maybe he doesn’t need the Force to guess what Hux is thinking right now.

Hux nods faintly, still looking at the scan. He can’t bring himself to agree.

\--

“Were you this sick with Shmi?” Kylo asks, when Hux has finished coughing and spitting into the toilet. He’s seated on the edge of the tub, one big hand sliding up and down Hux’s back.

“Not by half,” Hux says thickly. His throat feels raw and the inside of his mouth tastes sour. He leans his head against the side of the toilet, letting his eyes fall shut. The metal is cold against his hot face. “Stop touching me.”

For weeks now, ever since the pregnancy symptoms began to assert themselves, Hux has been miserably ill. He’s actually lost weight over the last month, on account of barely being able to eat. Only the blandest foods will stay down, and strong smells nauseate him. No matter how much he sleeps, he’s exhausted.

Obie keeps assuring him that the worst of the symptoms will fade soon, when he’s gotten through the first trimester. From there, she says, he’ll be able to put on a healthy amount of weight and all will be well. Hux is less than convinced.

In an effort to assuage his fears, or at least take the edge off, Hux has asked Obie to scan him weekly. She complies—humoring him, as much as a droid can. She seems to have noticed that listening to the heartbeat puts him temporarily at ease.

All the scans have come back normal. By now, the fetus actually looks human. Obie keeps saying that it’s developing as it should. No matter how awful he feels, at least the baby seems to be all right.

Kylo’s voice floats to him, low and concerned: “Are you okay?”

Hux peels his eyes open. He still feels shaky and sick, but there’s not much that can be done about it. “I’ll be all right,” he says, forcing himself to raise his head and sit up straighter. “Help me up, will you?”

\--

Pacifica 9 has two distinct seasons: cold and wet, and hot and wet. On this moon, the weather is usually either icy or muggy. Hux is glad they’re in the cold half of the year—whenever he goes out, he can wear a bulky overcoat to hide his growing stomach.

As Obie predicted, the nausea has tapered off in recent weeks. The heartburn is sticking around, and he still has bouts of dizziness, but he has considerably more energy than before. All things considered, he feels all right.

More guarded now than before, he and Kylo have agreed not to announce the pregnancy to anyone until Hux is well into the second trimester. Really, Hux would’ve preferred to wait until he’s past the midway point, when he would feel more confident about the baby’s health. But by fifteen weeks, he’s already round enough that Shmi is beginning to eye his midsection uncertainly. It’s not a complete surprise—he’s read that humans tend to show much sooner in their second pregnancy than their first—but it means Shmi will have to be the first person they tell.

As with all matters of importance, Hux prepares thoroughly.

“I think you’re making too much of this,” Kylo tells him at one point, skimming the script Hux has drafted. A thin crease has appeared between his eyebrows. “She’s four, Hux. She doesn’t need all this information. She’s not going to care.”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Hux says with a scoff. “We’re going to give her a comprehensive, age-appropriate explanation. It will make her less anxious about the entire process.”

Kylo looks unconvinced. “If you say so.”

Shmi has never had the opportunity to observe human siblings, nor human babies. She’s familiar with the concept from books and holovids, though, and Hux has been gently steering her toward such material ever since he found out he was pregnant again, so the idea is fresh in her mind. Finally, one evening, he and Kylo sit her down.

Awkwardly, Kylo clears his throat. “Shmi—you’re going to be a big sister,” he says. “Daddy is pregnant. That means, in a few months, he’s going to have a baby.”

“No, he isn’t,” Shmi says, in a tone that suggests she thinks she’s being tricked. Then she looks between Hux and Kylo, somewhat suspiciously. “Really?”

“Yeah, really,” Kylo tells her.

“Where are you getting it from?”

“Some humans have a special body part called a uterus,” Hux says, enunciating carefully. “It’s on the inside of the body, near the stomach. When a human is pregnant, that’s where the baby grows until it’s ready to be born. I have a uterus, and there’s a baby growing inside of it now—your new brother or sister.”

Shmi considers this for a long moment, her brow pinched. She looks at Hux’s stomach, which is undeniably rounded, and seems to accept the idea as plausible. “But where did the baby come from?”

“What do _you_ think?” Kylo asks her, before Hux can launch into the explanation he’d prepared in advance. Hux doesn’t know why he’d ever trusted Kylo to stick to the script; Kylo gets too much enjoyment out of Shmi’s elaborate responses to simple questions.

Again, she mulls it over. “The Force did it.”

“No,” Hux says immediately, while Kylo barks a laugh. “The Force had nothing to do with it—”

“I’m not laughing at you, Shmi,” Kylo promises, an outright lie, while he attempts to school his face into a more neutral expression. He coughs into his hand. “I was just thinking of something funny that Daddy said earlier—”

“If the Force didn’t put the baby there, where did it come from?”

“Oh, I put it there,” Kylo says, unhelpfully, then backpedals when Hux elbows him. He glances at Hux, as if for direction. “I mean—I helped?”

Hux sighs through his nose. “It takes two people to make a baby, and they need to have different kinds of body parts,” he tells Shmi. “Papa’s body is a bit different from mine. Together, we were able to make the baby.”

“So you did it on purpose?” She sounds dubious and vaguely accusatory.

“Yes, we did.”

“Why?”

Hux’s mouth opens, but nothing comes out. Somehow, he hadn’t anticipated this question. “Well…”

“We decided to have another baby because we wanted you to have a brother or sister, so you’ll never be lonely,” Kylo tells her easily. Then he leans forward. “It’s okay if you’re not excited about the baby right now, but I think you’re going to like being a big sister. When you’re both older, you’ll train with lightsabers together. Does that sound good?”

“Yeah,” Shmi says, smiling now. As usual, any talk of lightsabers is enough to put her in a good mood.

Hux is rather impressed with Kylo’s off-the-cuff response. He clears his throat. “Do you have any more questions, Shmi?”

Looking up at him, Shmi asks, “Can I go play with Obie now?”

Hux blinks. “Oh. Well—yes. You may.”

With that, she bounces to her feet and disappears into her bedroom.

Kylo glances at Hux. “I think that went well.”

\--

Once they’ve broken the news to Shmi, Hux leaves it to Kylo to announce the pregnancy to the people they encounter most often—regular customers, their nearest neighbors, the people they do business with. Hux is not entirely comfortable referring to this odd collection of aliens as their _friends,_ as Kylo does. But at this point, it’s just a matter of semantics. They’ve lived on this moon for years, and they’ve been more or less absorbed into the local community.

Hux gave Kylo the responsibility because he had no desire to field any probing questions himself. However, Kylo’s explanation has somehow left everyone with more questions than answers. To this day, Hux is not totally sure of what Kylo told everyone to leave them so confused.

Whenever he goes out, he’s pestered about the particulars of his condition. No one is shocked by the idea of a pregnant human man; with few preconceived notions about humans, they accepted that part without blinking. Rather, nobody seems to grasp the biological process. Because most of their alien acquaintances lay eggs or reproduce by other complicated means, Hux’s condition seems quite mysterious to them.

Most excruciating is how many individuals have freely offered their advice and assistance, despite having only the foggiest understanding of what human reproduction actually entails. Well-meaning but insufferably nosy aliens are constantly trying to feed Hux protein, usually in the form of bright green grub worms or other equally disgusting substances.

“I heard you and Eben are reproducing,” says the yellow-skinned girl at the produce tent, leaning two elbows on the counter. Her name is Zellima; she has four arms and four shiny dark eyes.

Hux makes a noncommittal noise. He just wants to buy his vegetables, dump them in the back seat of the speeder and drive home, not get entangled in another personal conversation. Rain taps steadily against the tent’s roof, hisses against the duracrete outside. Aliens mill around in the cool gray light, inspecting heaps of fruit and vegetables laid out on tables.

“Oh, how nice! And what a relief,” Zellima says. She rests her pointed chin on her hand. “I thought you were ill. Dying, possibly.”

“I beg your pardon?” Just when Hux thought he’d seen every possible reaction, someone surprises him.

“You looked awful! Really pale and tired,” she says carelessly. “And you were thinner in the face, but thicker through the middle. I was worried you had a gutworm.” Like an afterthought, Zellima straightens up and continues bagging Hux’s purchases. For someone with four hands, she’s remarkably slow. “So you’re about to lay your eggs, then? That’s why you’re so big?”

“What? No, I’m—” Hux shakes his head, exasperated. He feels like he’s explained this half a hundred times by now. “Humans are _mammals._ They give birth to live young.”

All four of her eyes widen. “You don’t say! How strange. Is that where your girl came from, as well?”

Hux coughs into his hand. “Yes.”

“And you only make one at a time? That doesn’t seem very efficient. Better to hatch four or five at once and be done with it, that’s what I say.”

“Ah,” Hux says mildly. He just wants this interaction to end already. “I see.”

Zellima grabs a basket and reaches out with one long arm, over the counter, toward a pile of lumpy, blue-gray fruit. She tosses half a dozen pieces into the basket and pushes it toward Hux. “Well,” she says, “you need good nutrition to grow sturdy eggs. I’m sure it’s the same with live young. So you’d better take these.”

\--

In the middle of helping Hux put the groceries away, Kylo pauses to frown thoughtfully at one of the hideous fruits. He sniffs at the thick, bumpy peel, brow furrowing. “So you don’t even know what it is?”

“I didn’t care to ask,” Hux replies, placing a canister of salt in a cupboard above the sink. At the table behind them, Shmi is seated on her box, eating cubes of pale blue cheese and ignoring her parents. “And I thought—well, if it’s disgusting, you’ll probably eat it.”

Kylo drops the fruit back into the basket; it lands like a leather ball. “Next time, I’ll take care of the groceries. You shouldn’t be on your feet so much. Or lugging things around. And,” he adds, with a sideways glance at Hux, “you probably shouldn’t be reaching for things on shelves, either.”

“Don’t be dramatic. I’m perfectly capable of running basic errands.” Hux has noticed lower back pain recently, but it’s not a great hindrance, not yet. Currently, his worst symptoms are heartburn and occasional shortness of breath, both of which are manageable enough. Since he knows he’ll be decreasingly useful in the coming months, he might as well do as much as possible now.

Standing there, Hux pauses when he feels movement inside of him: faint and strange, like a fish swimming in place. While he had not recognized Shmi’s earliest stirrings for what they were, he has the experience now to know that what he’s feeling is the baby. He doesn’t particularly care for it. The sensation is unsettling, even knowing the source.

“Do I look big to you?” Hux asks suddenly, remembering Zellima’s comments. With Shmi, he was almost six months pregnant before it looked obvious. This time, at about the same stage, he already feels enormous. None of his clothes fit properly anymore. He’s taken to wearing some of Kylo’s shirts, which are too wide for him through the chest and shoulders, but more forgiving through the middle.

Kylo goes conspicuously silent, as if he senses a trap.

“Well?” Hux prompts.

Slowly, Kylo says, “I don’t understand the question.”

“Forget it. You’re useless,” Hux says, rolling his eyes. A moment passes, while he places another item in the cupboard. “It’s strange. I never imagined having…” He pauses, gesturing vaguely. “Wacky alien neighbors.”

“Hux…” Kylo gives him a look. “You realize that _we_ _’re_ the wacky alien neighbors, don’t you?”

That stops Hux cold. Growing up in the First Order, he’d been taught to think of humans as the default, the most highly-evolved life forms in the galaxy, and to think of all other species as somehow deviating from that norm. It had made sense to him when he was a boy and knew nothing else. Even when he was old enough to tell propaganda from scientific fact, his feelings of discomfort surrounding alien species never went away.

Five years ago, Hux could never have envisioned himself living among xenos, doing business and socializing with them, accepting their congratulations and bizarre advice on a pregnancy. He could not have fathomed being one of only a handful of humans in a sea of other species—the deviation from the norm.

Since they settled on this moon, however, all those things have come to pass. He’s been surprised to find that most of their alien neighbors are tolerable, even agreeable. He’s come to like many of them, which shocked and appalled him in the beginning. His whole life here is totally inexplicable. And yet, it’s more satisfying than a life he would’ve had anywhere else.

“Anyway, you look fine,” Kylo says after a moment, clumsily. “I mean, you look good. Healthy. You’re, you know—”

“Don’t say it,” Hux warns.

“Glowing,” Kylo concludes, with an air of determination.

Hux grimaces. “Gods, Kylo, honestly—”

“What? I can’t even _compliment_ you without—”

“A trite cliché is hardly a genuine compliment. Shmi, darling, don’t play with your food,” Hux says quickly, glancing over his shoulder. At the table, Shmi is arranging the remaining pieces of cheese into a precarious-looking tower in the center of her plate.

“I’m not,” she protests, a blatant lie. A moment passes, and she scrunches up her nose and shoves a cube of cheese into her mouth.

“I meant what I said,” Kylo goes on.

Because Hux is facing away, he can safely roll his eyes. “Yes, well,” he says. “I suppose it’s the thought that counts.”

\--

“Would you like to know the sex?” Obie asks pleasantly, midway through the scan. Apparently, the baby is now developed enough for her to make it out, though to Hux’s untrained eyes, nothing jumps out.

“No,” Hux says, without hesitation. Biology can be deceptive. The baby’s anatomy won’t indicate anything important; he knows that better than anyone. There’s no point in making assumptions at this stage.

“I could tell you more accurately than a scan, anyway,” Kylo says, in a knowing voice.

Hux gives him a warning look. “Not a word.”

Sure enough, Kylo keeps quiet. But for days after, Hux keeps circling back to the idea, despite his best efforts.

The concept of assigned gender makes him uneasy, though he’s found it difficult to unhook himself completely from that way of thinking. When Shmi was an infant, he caught himself assuming that she was female, based on nothing other than her physical appearance, which made him worry that he was making the same mistake that his own father had made with him.

Kylo continually assured him that Shmi was a girl, based on some mystical insight—but, really, Hux has never put much stock in the Force. While its existence is not up for debate, Hux isn’t convinced that it’s as mystical and all-knowing as Kylo makes it out to be. In his opinion, when it comes to assigning gender, supernatural inklings are probably about as accurate as looking at a child’s anatomy—that is, a shot in the dark. Presumably, Shmi knows herself better than anyone else, including the Force.

If Shmi comes to him one day and announces that she isn’t a girl, Hux won’t be able to make up for the years he spent operating under a false assumption. But at least he’ll be able to amend his error. Whatever she’s feeling, he will respect it. While the thought doesn’t assuage all his anxiety, it takes the edge off. He supposes he’ll just take the same approach with the new baby. It’s all he can do.

“You really think you know what it is, then?” Hux asks, a few nights later.

Kylo raises his eyebrows. “Would you like me to tell you? I thought you wanted it to be a surprise.”

“Well—” Hux glances at Kylo, thoughtfully. He hasn’t forgotten how badly it stung when Kylo told him that the other baby, the one they lost, would have been a boy. That had made it all the more real to Hux. But this baby is already real. Knowing or not knowing won’t change that. “You’ll be insufferably smug, thinking you know something I don’t.”

At that, Kylo smiles faintly, like he knows what Hux is thinking. And maybe he does. “A girl,” he says, and leans in to kiss Hux. “Definitely a girl.”

\--

At the kitchen table, Hux is carefully going over the day’s accounts, like any other night. Kylo and Shmi are seated on the floor nearby, rolling a wooden ball back and forth using only the Force. Shmi may not have much fine control of the Force yet, but she’s getting better at actively harnessing it, in small ways.

Out of the blue, Shmi calls: “Daddy?”

Hux barely looks up. “Yes?”

“When’s the baby coming?”

“In about two more months. Before your birthday,” he adds, to give her a better idea of the timing. To Shmi, eight weeks will probably seem like an eternity—and in all honesty, Hux feels the same way. His back and hips have been killing him, and he feels like he can never quite get his breath. He’s ready for this to be over.

“Oh.” She sounds almost disappointed. She shoves the ball toward Kylo with the Force, then looks between Hux and Kylo. “I don’t want her. You have to send her back.”

A moment passes. Hux and Kylo exchange looks. Up to this point, Shmi’s main reaction to the pregnancy has been annoyance that she can’t climb onto Hux’s lap as easily as she once did, and that he can’t really pick her up anymore. Beyond that, she’s expressed little interest in her impending sibling.

The first time Hux encouraged her to feel the baby kick, thinking that might pique her interest, she seemed skeptical. As soon as she felt a jab, she jumped back, as though stung. Since then, she seems to have considered the baby to be something of an intruder, a mysterious entity that has taken up residence inside Hux.

“Shmi,” Kylo says slowly. “Why don’t you want the baby?”

“She’s going to cry all the time, and eat in the middle of the night, and nobody’s going to sleep,” Shmi complains. She sounds as if she’s been stewing on this list of grievances for some time.

Lately, Hux has made a point of discussing the baby with Shmi. He’s described what newborns are like, and their many needs, so Shmi will have an idea of what to expect. Abruptly, he realizes that his plan to relieve Shmi’s anxiety by telling her all about newborns has backfired. Instead of reassuring her, he’s given her cause for concern.

“Well, babies don’t know how to talk,” Kylo tells her. He glances sidelong at Hux, as if for direction. “So when they need something, they cry to let us know.”

“You cried quite a lot when you were a baby, Shmi,” Hux feels compelled to point out.

She looks dubious. “I didn’t.”

“Yes, you most certainly did. I remember it very clearly. Sometimes you cried for hours, for no good reason.” There were times when he’d been tempted to shake her, just to quiet her, but he hopes it won’t come to that this time around. “It was frustrating, but we never sent you back. It would be rather unfair to treat the baby differently, wouldn’t it?”

“Shmi,” Kylo says, patiently. “The baby will need a lot of attention for a while. That’s just the way it is. We did the same with you when you were little. But you’re a big girl now. You’re pretty independent. You don’t need as much help as a baby does, do you?”

She inclines her head and seems to mull it over for a moment. “That’s true,” she says at last, thoughtfully. She looks as if she rather likes that description of her. Really, Kylo is unfairly good at dealing with Shmi. He has an uncanny sense of which buttons of press. “I can take care of myself.”

“Exactly. Do you think you’ll be able to help us take care of the baby, then?”

She nods, looking significantly brighter than before. “Yeah, Papa, I’ll help with her.”

“Shmi,” Hux says slowly. He’s just noticed something. “Why do you keep calling the baby ‘she?’”

“Because she’s a girl.”

Hux shoots Kylo a look. He’d specifically instructed Kylo not to say anything of the kind to Shmi, so she wouldn’t be confused or disappointed if they turned out to be wrong. “Did Papa tell you that?”

“No. She did.”

“Who?”

“The baby,” Shmi says, a bit impatiently, like Hux is the one who’s not making sense. “I can tell.”

“Ah. I see,” Hux replies, though he doesn’t, really. A handful of times, Shmi has spoken in a way that suggests she’s generally aware of the baby through the Force—a kind of extrasensory perception that picks up on living beings in general—but nothing to this extent.

It’s more than a little unsettling, Hux thinks, though of course, she doesn’t mean anything by it. She can’t even help it.

Kylo is beaming. “That’s great, Shmi,” he tells her. He gives Hux a meaningful look, still smiling. “The Force is amazing, isn’t it?”

\--

Miserable weather be damned, Kylo has taken their most recent repair—a heavily modified swoop bike—out for a test drive. It’s his favorite part of the job, bar none, which is just as well, since Hux doesn’t care for it. Kylo probably won’t be back for an hour. He’ll tromp into the garage in time to lock up, undoubtedly soaked and grinning, and likely with a few new ideas for additional modifications.

At least one of them is enjoying himself, Hux thinks darkly. At thirty-four weeks along, he’s too pregnant to be of any great help, in the garage or anywhere else. He’s perpetually exhausted, he hurts everywhere, and he can’t lift heavy objects. Annoyingly, paperwork is about all he’s good for right now.

He’s behind the counter in the garage, hunting for a particular receipt, when the sound of heavy footsteps on duracrete makes him look up. For a second, he thinks Kylo’s come back from his test drive—but, no, he doesn’t recognize the person who’s just entered the garage. Humanoid, probably a merc of some kind, by the look of them. The stranger is tall and broad, wearing well-maintained body armor and a scarred helmet that conceals the face. A large blaster is strapped to one hip. No doubt, the merc has a few other weapons stowed away on their person.

Hux is not terribly impressed. He keeps a few blasters hidden behind the counter himself, for insurance purposes. “Can I help you with something?”

Reaching up with gloved hands, the merc pulls off the helmet and gives Hux a sharp smile. “Hello, Armie,” she says.

The woman standing there is so unexpected and so completely out of context that Hux almost doesn’t recognize her. For a few long beats, he just stares at her in consternation, until his brain finally kicks into gear. He stands up, hands braced on the counter. “Del?”

In a former life, Hux had known Del Phasma for the better part of two decades. Both the children of exiled Imperials, they attended the same military academy, a newly-established one housed aboard a massive ship, far from the prying eyes of the New Republic. The whole setup was deeply non-compliant with the Galactic Concordance.

Every other year, the academy put on the war games, a sort of competition in which groups of first- and second-year cadets were assigned to an upperclassman who acted as their commanding officer. The practice was meant to instill an appreciation for the chain of command in the younger cadets, and to give the older ones a chance to demonstrate their tactical and leadership abilities. The games themselves were a series of elaborate, live-fire military exercises, in which units were pitted against one another to achieve an objective—for example, to acquire a datachip that contained valuable intelligence, currently in the hands of another unit, whose own goal was to reach the only functioning shuttle and escape the grounds with the datachip in hand. It was not uncommon for cadets to die during these exercises, which made success all the more commendable.

Hux was sixteen during his first war games, a second-year cadet. By then, he’d been on hormone therapy for a little longer than two years and was consistently read as male, even by people who’d never met him before, which pleased him to no end. But his transition didn’t feel quite complete to him yet. Top surgery was the last item on his list; he’d wanted it so badly that it was almost a taste in his mouth. His father, however, saw no reason why Hux couldn’t wait until the end of the academic year to have the surgery, and maybe another year after that, when the timing would be more convenient.

To sixteen-year-old Hux, even one more year had seemed like an eternity. He’d never had much in the way of breasts, but he was tormented by what little he did have. They shouldn’t _be_ there. Usually, his father knew what was best for him—but this was a situation that Brendol simply could not understand.

The compression garment Hux wore under his uniform gave the appearance of a flat chest, which helped, but it restricted his movements and made it hard for him to catch his breath. Despite the disadvantages, he was unwilling to go without it, even in the midst of training exercises.

In the war games, his unit’s commanding officer was a fourth-year cadet named Del Phasma. She was tall and strong and dignified, eminently capable, an ideal soldier. Her keen eyes missed nothing; she didn’t take long to notice that Hux was usually huffing for breath and struggling to keep up with the other cadets.

It didn’t make sense to her—Hux was a skinny slip of a boy, sure, better suited for the classroom than the battlefield, but he’d met the academy’s minimum fitness requirements. He shouldn’t be so winded all the time. When she confronted him, Hux had no choice but to reluctantly explain about the binder.

His situation was not uncommon, even in the First Order. He wasn’t ashamed of himself, and had never been made to feel so by anyone else. But it was still an uncomfortably personal subject to discuss with one’s nominal commanding officer.

Phasma didn’t bat an eye at Hux’s anatomy. She did, however, berate him thoroughly for taking risks with his health—and, even more egregious, for endangering their unit’s place in the ranking by compromising his performance. That kind of chest compression during strenuous physical activity couldn’t possibly be good for him.

“A soldier’s body is his most important weapon,” Phasma had said, fixing Hux with a stern glare. He had yet to hit his most productive growth spurt, and she towered over him then. “I doubt you’ll ever see real combat—but as long as you’re under my command, you’ll conduct yourself as if you will. Is that understood, cadet?”

“Understood,” Hux had said, through his teeth. He was the commandant’s son; the other cadets, even the upperclassmen, simply didn’t talk to him that way.

But Del Phasma did, without hesitation and without fear of reprisal. She didn’t care whose son he was. She cared only for the effectiveness of their unit and the physical health of the soldiers under her command. In that moment, Hux had been affronted by her abrasiveness—but later, upon reflection, he was intrigued. He came to respect her for that brazen approach, among other things.

In the end, Phasma discretely steered him toward a different type of supportive garment, one designed for physical activity. It didn’t flatten him as much as he would’ve preferred, but Hux had acknowledged that, in this instance, breathing and range of motion were the most important considerations. He wore the new garment during subsequent exercises, and both his physical performance and their unit’s rank improved accordingly.

The following year, in a break between terms, Hux convinced his father to allow him a brief medical leave to undergo surgery. Recovery time was minimal. With the aid of bacta, he healed cleanly, without so much as a scar, and he was back at the academy within a few weeks.

Phasma graduated a few years ahead of Hux, in a different track. They corresponded occasionally. Years later, when Hux was promoted to general, he personally appointed Phasma to help him revitalize the stormtrooper program. His father had provided a solid foundation, but there was always room for improvement.

The two of them had always disagreed about what made a good soldier. While Hux believed that vivid simulations were more than sufficient preparation, Phasma argued that real combat experience was the key. It was a fundamental difference of opinion, and they’d butted heads considerably—but Hux rather liked that about Phasma. He always had. She challenged him to examine things from another angle, and he appreciated her point of view, even if he did not always follow her advice.

They had worked well together, the two of them. They’d accomplished a great deal, before it all went sideways. Hux had never thought he’d see Phasma again, had not even entertained the thought—and now she’s here, standing in his garage.

Her white-blond hair is longer than it once was, slicked back, away from her face. She looks older, a bit weathered, and she’s sporting a thick knot of scar tissue along one cheek, as if she’d been shot in the face some time ago. But it’s her, undeniably. Phasma. Hux had sort of assumed that she was dead, along with the rest of his old comrades.

Looking him up and down, she wastes no time on pleasantries. “What in the seven hells happened to you?”

A hundred questions are implied in her tone, but Hux chooses to answer the most obvious one. “If you must know,” he says crisply, with as much dignity as he can muster, “I’m expecting a baby.”

She huffs a breath. “Stars, that’s a relief. I thought you’d just gotten fat.”

Kylo chooses that moment to reappear, ducking through the side door, rainwater streaming from his overcoat and puddling around his boots on the duracrete. When he spots Phasma, his face twists into a blend of confusion and suspicion. One hand slides toward his belt, where his lightsaber is always clipped, in easy reach—though he doesn’t grasp it just yet.

“No,” Phasma says, sounding both scandalized and delighted. All of a sudden, when she looks back at Hux, her eyes are gleaming. “Oh, Armie, tell me you didn’t really take up with _him,_ of all people—”

“You’re not in a position to ask him any questions,” Kylo cuts across her, a bit sharply. His hand is still hovering near the hilt of his lightsaber.

Hux grimaces. “None of that,” he says, raising one hand in a quelling gesture. “If she were here to blow my brains out, she’d have done it before you walked in.”

Looking reluctant, Kylo drops his hand, though he still looks primed to grab for the lightsaber again. Hux takes a breath.

“I propose we take this upstairs for the time being,” he says, glancing meaningfully at Kylo. “Lock up for me, will you?”

Phasma gives Hux a slow smile. She doesn’t appear the slightest bit unruffled. “Sounds perfect,” she says. “We have so much catching up to do.”

\--

“Careful—that smarts,” Phasma complains, as Hux peels back the synthskin on her cybernetic right hand and opens the access port on the underside of her wrist. They’re seated at the kitchen table, a set of Hux’s specialized tools laid out. When Phasma mentioned that the hand had been giving her trouble, Hux offered to give her a tune-up, for old time’s sake.

She’s had the prosthesis for ages. She lost the original hand a few years out of the academy, helping to break up a rebellion on a small industrial planet colonized by the First Order. As Hux recalls, she received a commendation for her service, as well as a promotion. The loss of her hand marked the beginning of her rise in the ranks.

“Come now. You have a higher pain tolerance than that,” Hux says, squinting at the inner workings of Phasma’s hand. “Just hold still.”

She does. Eventually, she asks, “Aren’t you a little old to be having babies?”

“Yes,” Hux says, seeing no reason not to be honest. By the time the baby is born, in a few more weeks, he’ll have turned forty-one. Pregnancy was hard enough on his body when he was thirty-six; he should’ve anticipated how much more of a strain it would be this time. “I don’t recommend it.”

“An ill-conceived notion, you might say?”

“Quiet. I’m trying to concentrate.”

Hux has already given her the truncated version of how he and Kylo came to live on Pacifica 9. He explained how he’d surrendered himself to the Resistance in the hopes of escaping before he stood trial, but ended up giving birth while in custody. By the time Kylo scooped both Hux and the baby out of the Resistance’s hands, the war was all but done. It would’ve been pointless to return to the First Order. There was no army left for Hux to lead, no victory to seize. Even the Supreme Leader’s strength was failing, or so Kylo said.

Phasma had reached much the same conclusion, apparently. She knew a sinking ship when she saw one. With Hux and Kylo both gone, and without Snoke’s guidance, the First Order was collapsing in on itself. What remained of their armada began to split into factions, when they ought to have banded together, a united front. In the end, Phasma got out while she still could, and fell back on her old skill set as she embarked on a new life—this time, as a mercenary.

Del Phasma, a hired gun. Hux had scoffed when she told him. A mercenary was a considerable step down for a senior military officer, career-wise—but, then again, so was a mechanic.

“What I want to know,” Hux says now, as he continues to tinker with the hand, “is how you found us.”

“Worried someone else will?”

“The thought had crossed my mind.”

“A few months ago, I spent the night with a young lady,” Phasma says. “Twi’lek. Lovely girl. She wanted to take me for a ride on her swoop bike. It was customized, nice-looking—reminded me a great deal of your handiwork. I thought it had to be coincidence. Armitage Hux has been dead for years. I asked the girl who did all that work on her bike. Imagine my surprise when she said it was a human mechanic with funny-colored hair.”

“Well,” Hux says primly. “It just goes to show that you can’t believe everything you hear on the holonews.”

“I suppose not. Naturally, I had to see for myself—and here I am.” She pauses, studying him from across the table. “When I dropped ship here, I was just trying to satisfy my curiosity, put the notion to rest. I didn’t really think it would be you. Not to mention Ren.”

“Thought he was dead, too, did you?”

“Dead, or meditating in a cave somewhere,” she drawls. “You know, I had my suspicions about the two of you, back in the day—but I can’t believe you actually ran away with him, got hitched, and had a baby.” Phasma shakes her head. With her free hand, she gestures toward his stomach, accusingly. “Two babies! You’ve gone soft.”

A bit reluctantly, he admits, “Technically speaking, I had a baby, then ran away with him, and _then_ married him.”

Phasma laughs, a sound as abrupt as blaster fire. “Stars, you can’t do anything right!”

Despite himself, Hux laughs, too. Then he continues making delicate adjustments to the cybernetic hand, while Phasma watches patiently. Eventually, he asks, “Aren’t you going to tell me about the mercenary life?”

“Oh, I’m sure you can imagine. Flying, fighting, fucking.”

“A girl in every port?”

Her smile is sharp. “Something like that.”

“Your life is an adventure holo,” Hux says wryly. Finished, he closes the access port. “Is that what you’re telling me?”

“Sure,” Phasma says with a snort. “And yours is…” She glances around the apartment, at casual clutter in the sitting room, the holophotos lined up on a shelf. “What is this, exactly? What have you been _doing_ all these years? Other than playing fast and loose with your birth control, I mean.”

Before Hux can retort, he hears shuffling footsteps. Looking over his shoulder, he sees Shmi wander out of her bedroom, where Obie had been entertaining her. The sound of chatter must’ve piqued her interest. She edges across the sitting room to approach Hux, her dark eyes locked on Phasma.

“Daddy,” she says in a loud whisper, half-hiding behind Hux’s chair. “Who’s that?”

“Oh! Is this the whelp?” Phasma glances at Hux, eyebrows raised. “She looks nothing like you.”

Distractedly tugging on Hux’s sleeve, Shmi continues to gape at Phasma. Her eyes are huge, like she’s never seen anything like the tall, blond woman in front of her—and, belatedly, Hux realizes that she hasn’t. Shmi has never actually seen a human woman before, at least not in person; in fact, the only other humans she’s ever been around are Hux and Kylo. Otherwise, she’s surrounded by aliens at all hours.

“This is Del Phasma,” Hux tells her.

“I’m an old friend of your father’s,” Phasma explains. She rises from her chair and walks around the other side of the table, bending so she’s closer to Shmi’s eye level. “And you must be Shmi.”

A moment passes. Shmi looks skeptical, her mouth worked into a frown. But when Phasma extends one big hand—the organic one—Shmi slowly reaches out to shake it. Phasma’s calloused hand engulfs Shmi’s much smaller one.

“That’s quite a grip you’ve got,” Phasma says, with a kind of indulgent appreciation that Hux wouldn’t have expected from her. “I like that in a girl.” She braces her hands on her thighs, smiling. “Now that we’ve been introduced, would you like to hear some funny stories about your father?”

“Del—” Hux’s tone is half-helpless and half-warning.

But it’s too late. Shmi’s eyes have already lit up. “Yes, please!”

At that, Phasma smiles even wider, almost wickedly. “You know, Shmi, I think we’re going to be wonderful friends…”

\--

By the time Kylo has closed up for the night and come upstairs, Shmi is enchanted by their guest. If Phasma hadn’t won her over with exaggerated stories about her time at the academy with Hux, she would’ve managed it through feats of strength. One involved Phasma simply hoisting Shmi over her head with one hand, as if she weighed no more than a small sack of rice. At that point, Shmi practically had stars in her eyes.

Phasma eats dinner at their table. Later, it takes some wheedling to get Shmi into bed, as she is reluctant to say goodnight to Phasma.

Once Shmi is safely ensconced in her bedroom, Kylo goes to a cabinet and returns with a bottle of the good liquor. It’s unopened. Kylo bought it last year with the nebulous intention of saving it for a special occasion, but before such an opportunity presented itself, they started trying to get pregnant, and Hux stopped drinking entirely.

“For old time’s sake,” Kylo says, brandishing the bottle.

Admittedly, the three of them used to share the occasional drink in the officer’s lounge aboard the _Finalizer,_ but Hux suspects there’s a bit more to it. Kylo hasn’t had a drink in months, more out of a sense of self-preservation than solidarity; it doesn’t take much to annoy Hux these days, and he’d probably bite Kylo’s head off for drinking in front of him. Now that they have a guest to entertain, however, Kylo is taking full advantage of the opportunity.

“Nothing for you, I take it?” Phasma asks Hux, getting entirely too much enjoyment out of all of this.

“Corellian brandy tastes like piss at the best of times,” Hux replies. “I wouldn’t be missing much.”

Several hours slip past. Unable to consume anything stronger than tea, Hux watches—somewhat resentfully—as Kylo and Phasma slide down the slope toward drunkenness. Eventually, Kylo gets loose enough to recount some of the more dramatic episodes of his family history, which have Phasma laughing and gasping in shock at turns.

“You know, Ren,” she says thoughtfully, gesturing with her glass and nearly sloshing some liquor over the rim. “This explains a lot. I always thought you were a bit of a creep, what with the whole Darth Vader fetish. I figured you’d come out of one of those Vader cults that cropped up after the war. It’s still creepy, of course—but at least it makes _sense_ now.”

By some miracle, this doesn’t set Kylo off on a tangent. He just shakes his head. “You know nothing of the dark side,” he mutters, and refills his glass.

Hux slips the bottle out of sight before Kylo has the chance to drink himself under the table. With the liquor mysteriously disappeared, the night winds down.

“I’d offer you the couch,” Hux says, as he walks Phasma to the door. “But we both know you’d never fit.”

Phasma laughs and slaps him on the back—not half as forcefully as she would’ve in the old days, he thinks, apparently more conscious of hurting him now. “Oh, Armie,” she says fondly. “With friends like you, who needs enemies?”

\--

Phasma spends a week on Pacifica 9.

Much to Shmi’s delight, Phasma is willing to entertain her for hours at a time, regaling her with stories of her adventures both in and out of the military, or indulging her in the kind of horseplay that she otherwise only gets from Kylo. More than once, Phasma asks Hux when he intends to begin Shmi’s martial education.

“At her age,” Phasma points out, “cadets in the stormtrooper program would’ve already—”

“Shmi is not a stormtrooper,” Hux says, perhaps more sharply than he’d meant to. But Phasma had struck a nerve he didn’t even realize he had. He’d been proud of the stormtrooper program that he and Phasma built together, but that kind of life was for other children, not his daughter. “You’d do well to remember that.”

Phasma’s pale eyebrows arch. “I only mean that certain elements of the program could be useful,” she says at last, diplomatically. “Combat training certainly didn’t hurt either of us.”

“Ah, yes,” he drawls. “I remember it well. Taking a beating from a fellow cadet really builds character.”

She huffs lightly. “Regardless, I assume Ren has some plans for her.”

“I wouldn’t know. I don’t meddle in sorcery.” Hux and Kylo have discussed it, but he doesn’t need to get into that with Phasma, at least not now. Really, he prefers not to think of it at all. “And in any case, she’s four years old. There’s plenty of time.”

“As you say,” Phasma acquiesces, but her eyes betray her skepticism.

Days pass. Phasma teases Hux relentlessly about his condition—but at the same time, she’s oddly careful around him, always stepping lightly, as if she’s afraid that’s she going to accidentally bump into him and cause something dreadful to happen.

In the evenings, the three of them sit around in the apartment and confer about the state of the galaxy. In her travels, Phasma’s seen a fair few things that haven’t been widely reported on the HoloNet. She tells of insurrections cropping up across the Outer Rim, sparked by famine and disease and poverty. She tells of warlords and crime syndicates grappling for control of destitute worlds, and of roaring trade in slaves and illegal spice. Left unchecked, these issues will eventually spread to the Mid Rim, like a cancer.

It’s the same old story, Hux thinks, a trap that any weak government could fall into. Though it feels as if the war happened an age ago, it’s still early days. The New Republic is steadying itself, restructuring and rebuilding, and it can’t keep up with the demands of its many member worlds. Without strong, centralized leadership, the problems will only worsen—and if Hux knows anything about the New Republic, it’s that they’ll wait until it’s much too late to do anything about it.

A war was fought for this system of government—a war that Hux lost. Eventually, it will be fought again. That’s the nature of the universe: a series of events repeating endlessly, all the same mistakes. Maybe it will even happen in Hux’s lifetime. But whatever happens, he knows he won’t be fighting.

On a rainy morning, Phasma stops by the garage to say goodbye. It’s time for her to tackle her next job, some bloody business on a mining colony. Shmi is heartbroken to see her go. Somehow, over the last few days, she’s gotten it in her head that Phasma would be a permanent fixture.

Before, when Hux had felt confident that he would never see Phasma again, it was easy to feel nothing but a distant and muted regret. But now that’s he’s spent this time with her, he knows he’ll miss her, acutely.

All this week, Phasma’s presence has flooded him with memories of another life, one he’d never thought he would glimpse again—General Hux’s life. Being confronted with his past like this is strange, and a little painful, like pressing on a half-healed bruise. But it’s not entirely unwelcome. It doesn’t leave a bitter taste in his mouth the way he would’ve expected.

Kylo seems a bit annoyed by the extended goodbyes. He rather likes Phasma; Hux is confident of that. Once upon a time, the two of them were an effective team when deployed on the ground, and they’ve gotten along in the last few days—but Kylo is also weirdly jealous of both Hux’s and Shmi’s affections. He prefers this little corner of the galaxy to contain just the three of them. And soon, the four of them.

“Come now—no tears,” Phasma admonishes gently. She crouches so she’s closer to Shmi’s eye level and delicately tips the girl’s chin upward with one finger. “I’ll come visit you again soon. And I’ll bring you a present. Would you like that?”

It takes some coaxing, but Shmi reluctantly agrees to Phasma’s proposal. She wipes her nose on her sleeve, sniffling a little.

“That’s a good girl,” Phasma says, and tousles Shmi’s hair, messing up her braid. As she straightens, Phasma looks to Hux and Kylo. “Well, I’m off. Don’t want to risk overstaying my welcome.”

“Give us a heads-up the next time you come this way,” Kylo says.

“Oh, where’s the fun in that?” Phasma bares her teeth in a grin. Then she elbows Hux meaningfully. “Name the new one after me, won’t you, Armie?”

“I make no promises,” Hux tells her. “And never call me that again.”

That makes her laugh. She gives him an ironic salute before she slips out into the rain.

\--

Hux isn’t always sure if having Kylo around to help him is worth how unbelievably annoying Kylo has become.

He barely lets Hux out of arm’s reach anymore. Now that the baby’s movements are strong enough to feel from the outside, he paws at Hux incessantly, eager to feel any kicks. For his part, Hux just wants Kylo to keep his hands to himself.

Embarrassingly, when they lie in bed at night, Kylo wants to press his ear to Hux’s stomach and listen to the baby’s heartbeat. Hux does not typically allow this, on the grounds that Kylo can accomplish much the same thing using the Force, without bothering Hux by touching him. However, he allots Kylo ten minutes per day, in private, during which he can yammer freely to Hux’s stomach. It’s ridiculous behavior to see from a grown man, even in small doses, but Kylo sulks if he’s denied access.

“Can’t you do that—I don’t know, telepathically?” Hux asks one night. He’s sitting up against the headboard, a pillow supporting his lower back, reading silently off his datapad. On the mattress beside him, Kylo lies propped up on one elbow while he addresses Hux’s midsection. “It can’t hear you.”

Kylo looks up with a frown. “She can hear everything we say. And she recognizes our voices,” he adds, sliding his palm along the curve of Hux’s stomach. “Right, baby?”

Almost immediately, the baby rolls over. Hux frowns when he feels the movement—little traitor. “That was a coincidence,” he tells Kylo, who just smiles smugly and presses a brief kiss to the top of Hux’s stomach.

“I was reading,” Kylo says, a minute later.

“If it’s about another complication or horrifying birth defect, I don’t want to hear it,” Hux warns. Lately, Kylo has been scaring himself with HoloNet horror stories and relaying his concerns to Hux. It’s unbearable. “We discussed this.”

Kylo has the gall to look wounded. “I told you, I stopped reading that stuff.”

“Only because I forced you.”

“As I was saying,” Kylo persists. “I read somewhere that, depending on resources, some humans prefer to labor in a tub of water. It’s supposed to be less painful. Obie says she’s done it that way before. And we have access to plenty of water.”

Hux makes a considering noise. In recent days, Kylo has refocused his medical anxiety into something more constructive: fussing over the birth plan. He’s been scouring the HoloNet for practical information on home births, which Hux supposes is better than him filling his head with gory details of deliveries gone wrong.

Some of the ideas he’s shared with Hux are definitely better than others. Yesterday, he suggested that perhaps Shmi could be present for her sibling’s birth, if the experience wasn’t too overwhelming for her. Hux dismissed it out of hand. How absurd. He’s barely comfortable with the idea of Kylo being in the room and seeing him in such a state, much less Shmi.

“I’ve read that, as well,” Hux says eventually. “It makes a sort of sense. But I’d rather not.”

“What did you have in mind?”

“The bedroom would be the obvious choice.”

Almost instantly, Kylo gets a ridiculous, sappy look on his face. “So you can have the baby in our bed,” he says. “She’ll be born the same place we made her.”

Hux can’t help but frown, more out of embarrassment than anything else. “You’re a bit disgusting, did you know that? And I’m still not convinced it’s a girl.”

That does nothing to dampen Kylo’s enthusiasm. “She is,” he promises. “You’ll see.”

\--

“Are you all right?” Kylo sounds only half awake, even as one of his big hands settles on Hux’s hip, fingers flexing absently.

Hux peels his eyes open. He’s not sure what time it is. Their bedroom is dim, only a hint of pale gray light slipping around the curtains. He can hear rain pattering against the window.

It was a cramp that woke him, a twinge of pain that was followed by another, some minutes later. Kylo must’ve felt him shifting around, struggling to settle into a more comfortable position—but at this point, just shy of thirty-eight weeks along, Hux isn’t sure there is such a thing.

“I didn’t mean to wake you,” he says quietly. “Go back to sleep.”

“Is it the baby?”

“No more than usual.” It’s not a lie. He’s slept poorly these last few weeks, between his general discomfort, the baby kicking at inconvenient times, and his near-constant urge to piss. The cramps are just another item on a long list of complaints. “I’m all right. Nothing to worry about.”

“Are you sure?” Kylo props himself up on one elbow, leaning close enough that Hux can feel his body heat. “I think it might be time. Not immediately, but I—”

“If you say one word about the Force, I’m going to strangle you,” Hux says immediately. He can’t quite keep the annoyance out of his voice. Mystical twinges aside, Kylo has no experience in this area and shouldn’t pretend otherwise. “I know more about what’s happening in my body than you.”

“Obie should look at you, just in case. I’ll get her.”

“Don’t you dare.” Hux exhales through his nose. He’s not due for another two and a half weeks. The baby isn’t coming now. In all likelihood, he’s just having practice contractions, and they’ll taper off soon. “Kylo, I’m tired. Let me sleep a while longer.”

It takes some coaxing, but eventually, Kylo lies back down and seems to fall asleep again. Hux manages to doze, though he can’t quite relax enough for anything deeper. By the time he feels Kylo get out of bed, the cramps are still coming at intervals. They don’t cease even when he changes position or stands up, which suggests they may not be practice contractions after all.

He waits for Kylo to go downstairs to open the garage—Hux has no reason to accompany him, and hasn’t for several weeks, ever since Obie and Kylo conspired to bully him into taking medical leave—then asks Obie to examine him. Sure enough, he’s in early labor.

It’s sooner than he’d expected, and sooner than he would’ve liked. But then again, technically speaking, he’s full-term. Obie assures him that the baby’s lungs are probably well-developed enough to breathe, which is his biggest concern. She says there’s no reason to try to stop the labor from progressing, and he chooses to trust her.

The contractions are mild enough that he’s able to putter around like normal. He fixes breakfast for Shmi and forces himself to eat something, as well, though he doesn’t feel much like eating. He handles Shmi’s midmorning lesson. And he tries not to worry.

Kylo returns to the apartment around midday. Whether through the Force or by some other means, he seems to sense almost immediately what’s going on. “I knew it,” he says, crossing the room in a few long strides. “I told you it was time—”

“Well, not for a while yet,” Hux says primly, “so you might as well—”

“You should’ve told me immediately!”

“I was hoping to put off your inevitable overreaction for as long as possible,” Hux replies.

“I didn’t mean you,” Kylo says. Then he frowns at the droid, who has been casually shadowing Hux all morning, running intermittent bioscans. “Obie, we talked about this. You’re supposed to keep me informed!”

Obie quails about as much as a droid can, her eyelights drooping. “My apologies, sir. But your husband expressly forbade me from doing so, and my programming requires me to put my patient’s wishes first.”

Kylo looks offended. “I’m closing the garage,” he announces, and promptly disappears downstairs again, before Hux can even think to argue.

\--

When Hux went into labor with Shmi, the reality of the situation dawned on him slowly, over the course of several hours.

He could’ve called to the guard posted outside his cell and asked for medical assistance; in hindsight, he probably should’ve. But instead, he’d ignored the contractions to the best of his ability, even as they got closer and closer together, and increasingly painful. Hard as it was to track the passage of time in his windowless cell—the days and weeks all blended together—he’d known he was due very soon, and he’d been dreading this process, not to mention everything he knew would come after, to the point that he couldn’t bring himself to actively face it.

Eventually, though, the monitoring bracelet molded to his wrist picked up on the changes to his vitals. It must’ve triggered some kind of alert, because a medic arrived to examine him and confirm that he was in labor. A few hours later, he was transferred to medbay.

Looking back now, the messy details escape him. His memory of Shmi’s birth is a blur of white light, and the murmuring of medidroids, and breath-stealing pain. He was forced to labor on his back, a position that gave the medidroids clear access, but that he found to be inefficient and excruciating. The whole process was more frightening than he’ll ever admit.

And it’s stressful this time, as well—but there’s something to be said for not being cuffed to the bedrail, for being free to pace around between contractions and change position when he feels the need. Even better is having someone to grouse at, or rub his shoulders, or lean against while he rides out a contraction. Kylo has provided all of those things.

Kylo’s main duty, however, is to care for Shmi, to keep her calm and distracted. She’s aware that the baby is coming soon—probably by tomorrow morning—though she’s a bit foggy on the mechanics. She doesn’t seem especially curious about what’s happening now; for the most part, she’s been content to eat her lunch, play with Kylo, have her bath, and otherwise go on as normal.

Somehow, even with Shmi to keep him busy, Kylo manages to hover incessantly, encouraging Hux to eat and drink water, badgering the droid with questions. Maybe he’s overcompensating for the fact that he wasn’t present when Shmi was born. Hux has to keep redirecting Kylo’s attention back to Shmi, if only to get a moment’s peace.

Hours pass. When the contractions become painful enough that Hux can’t talk through them, he retreats into the bedroom. Shmi doesn’t need to see him in excessive pain.

“Not long now, sir,” Obie assures him. Her cheerfulness is almost infuriating. “Before you know it, your baby will be here!”

He just hopes she’s right.

\--

By late evening, the sky outside the bedroom window is a bruised blue, and the rain has picked up. Hux is kneeling beside the bed, his arms braced on the mattress, so gravity can do some of the work. Kylo crouches beside him, repeating meaningless encouragements.

“You’re doing so well,” Kylo says. “You’re almost done.”

Hux barely hears him, all his focus consumed by the task at hand. With Shmi, he’d strained for an hour before he made any real progress—but this time around, he only has to push twice before he feels the stinging pressure that tells him the head is beginning to crown.

He can’t believe he ever thought having another baby was a good idea. How could he have forgotten how much it hurt?

“Stop pushing for now,” Obie advises, from her place behind him. “Baby is coming quickly, and you might tear.”

Hux makes a frustrated noise. “I don’t care,” he says raggedly. “I want it out.”

“No,” Kylo tells him, in a decisive tone. “You’ll hurt yourself. Don’t push.”

“Oh, fuck you,” Hux hears himself say. When he delivered Shmi, he tore badly enough that the attending droid had to stitch him up; apparently, he was undeserving of bacta. It was painful in the weeks that followed, but not so painful that he’s unwilling to risk it a second time. He just wants this to be over. “What do you care? You did this to me.” He squeezes his eyes shut, jaw tightening as another contraction builds. “Stars, I can’t—I need to push—”

Kylo reaches out to turn Hux’s face toward him, cupping his jaw. “Not yet,” he says, gentle but firm. His eyes are dark. “It’s all right. You’re all right. Look at me, and breathe.”

The contraction peaks, and it takes every ounce of restraint that Hux has not to bear down. He’s shaking; the urge to push is overwhelming, the pressure getting worse every moment. But he keeps looking at Kylo, whose touch helps anchor him. He blows through the pain, like he’s extinguishing a candle. It helps—enough to get him through the contraction, and the one that follows, and the one after that, until Obie finally determines that he’s ready to continue.

“Gently now,” Obie is saying. “Little pushes. That’s it, very good, just like that…”

By now, the urge is so strong that pushing is a relief, despite the intense, painful stinging. Hux presses his face into the mattress to muffle his moans; he doesn’t want to make too many horrible noises and upset Shmi, who is supposed to be sleeping but who can probably hear him through the wall. Kylo’s hand slides up and down his back, a steady pressure. Hux pushes again, hard—and suddenly, the pressure is gone.

It happens so smoothly that, for a moment, Hux doesn’t fully register that the baby is outside of his body. He’s just stunned, blood rushing in his ears. And then he hears a cry: weak at first, getting louder.

Somewhere, Kylo is saying, “She’s here, look at her, Hux—”

He does, a bit lightheaded. Kylo holds the wailing baby carefully in his big, calloused hands; the cord has been clamped, but not yet cut. She’s not much to look at, honestly, gray-tinged and covered in bodily fluids. A few wisps of damp dark hair cling to her scalp. She has Kylo’s oversized ears. Hux loves her already. He reaches out to touch her, careless of the mess, almost unable to believe how small she is.

Obie is attempting to examine the baby but is having a hard time wrangling her away from Kylo, who has her cradled against his chest. He keeps kissing Hux’s sweaty face, babbling: “You did so well, Hux, so well, she’s beautiful—”

“Enough of that,” Hux says at last, breathlessly. “Let the droid see her. And help me up.”

With great reluctance, Kylo passes the baby to the droid. Obie whisks their daughter to a low table where some supplies are already laid out, tittering to herself as she commences her scans and gets the baby cleaned up. Meanwhile, Kylo helps Hux stand on shaky legs and get onto the bed.

Before long, the contractions will begin again and he’ll have to deliver the placenta—but before that happens, he’ll get to hold his baby. Nobody is going to take her from him this time.

\--

Kylo whispers, “How do you feel about Padmé?”

It’s so late at night that it’s nearly morning. Kylo and Hux are in bed, Shmi fast asleep in the narrow space between them, slumped against Kylo’s side. Meanwhile, Hux is holding the baby in the crook of his arm, bottle-feeding her with his other hand. He’s exhausted, his whole body sore, but at the same time, he feels too wired to sleep. Now that he’s holding the baby, he doesn’t want to relinquish her, not even to Kylo so he can get some rest.

Hux didn’t get to hold Shmi like this when she was born, didn’t even get to look at her. At the time, he’d assumed that he would die without ever seeing her. If Shmi wasn’t Kylo’s daughter, Organa would never have allowed it.

Earlier tonight, Kylo had put Shmi to bed at the usual time, but the baby’s high, thin wailing apparently piqued Shmi’s curiosity. It wasn’t long before she was rattling the doorknob of their bedroom. Hux had intended to wait until morning to make the introductions, but there was nothing for it. And so, once both Hux and the baby were cleaned up and the mess was squared away, he allowed Kylo to bring Shmi in to meet her sister.

Shmi remained skeptical, even as she clambered onto the bed to sit beside Hux and peer at the bundle in his arms. “She’s so little,” Shmi had said, while she scrutinized the drowsing baby. “I thought she would be bigger.”

Cautiously, Shmi examined the baby’s tiny hand, and then gave a little gasp when the baby reflexively squeezed her finger.

“See, she already likes you,” Kylo had told her, smiling encouragingly. “That’s how she says hello.”

And like a light switching on, despite her earlier reticence, Shmi was suddenly fascinated by the baby, eager to look at her and touch her. If only Hux had known it would be that easy. He hopes it stays that way.

Five years ago, he could never have envisioned this for himself, could never have dreamed of wanting this: a husband, and two children, and a quiet life on a backwater moon. And yet, it’s good—too good to be real, almost, too good to keep.

“Tell me you’re joking,” Hux says now. It’s funny—leading up to the baby’s arrival, Hux and Kylo had discussed seemingly every subject at length. But somehow, they never got around to choosing a name. “Padmé? Really?”

“On some planets, it’s a very popular name.”

Rolling his eyes lightly, Hux replies, “Oh, I’m sure it’s quite a fashionable name on Naboo. But not around here. And besides, you don’t get to name _both_ of them.”

Kylo pouts a little. “I was just making a suggestion.”

“Well, I’m putting my foot down. The Darth Vader theme has to stop.” Hux pauses to study the baby again. She already looks like Kylo: dark-haired and dark-eyed. “I want to call her Delphine.”

“Now _you_ _’re_ joking.”

“I don’t joke.”

A moment passes. Kylo blinks, then frowns. “You want to name our daughter after Phasma? Is this because she dared you to?”

Hux is a little surprised that Kylo actually knows Phasma’s given name, since she’s only ever gone by Del. Primly, he says, “Delphine Phasma is my oldest and most trusted friend. I think it makes about as much sense as you naming Shmi after a grandmother you never even met.”

Shaking his head, Kylo says, “You shouldn’t be making any big decisions while you’re this hormonal.”

The only thing that stops Hux from immediately yelling is the two sleeping children.

\--

Once upon a time, Hux had hoped that Delphine would be a calmer, quieter baby than Shmi—but if anything, she’s even fussier. At least he’s better-equipped to cope with all the wailing than he was the last time around. It helps that they have Obie, who never tires and is happy to feed or change the baby in the middle of the night.

At the moment, however, Obie is powered off, her back panel removed, so Hux can make some small adjustments. She’s been complaining of stiffness in her limbs, which Hux attributes to a bad connection somewhere in her neural network, not unlike an issue with the brain signals firing down the spinal cord. He’s set up under the big lamp in the sitting room, where he can use the low table for his tools and half-watch the children from the corner of his eye.

“Daddy,” Shmi whines. She’s standing over the mat near the couch, where four-month-old Delphine lies on her back, red-faced and howling, her limbs waving helplessly. “Daddy, she’s crying again!”

“Yes, darling, I hear her,” Hux says, a bit tightly, without taking his eyes off Obie’s mechanical innards. “Kylo? Kylo, you’re meant to be watching them—”

“Coming!” There’s a clatter in the next room, and then Kylo wanders out of the kitchen, looking harried. His hair is tied back in a messy bun to keep it out of his face, but a few strands have escaped. “I’ve got food on the stove right now, Hux.”

“And I’m in the middle of delicate repairs. So unless something is actually on fire—”

“If you’d rather deal with the droid than the baby, just say so,” Kylo says, brow furrowed.

In the space of a moment, from that statement alone, Hux infers about a hundred criticisms about his parenting. But he’s acutely aware of Shmi standing there, so he manages not to snap. “Fine, I’ll do it,” he says, tightly, and sets aside his tools. “But this droid is the only thing that allows either of us to get a decent night’s sleep, in case you forgot.”

Kylo’s mouth turns down at the corners, but he doesn’t respond. He just ducks back into the kitchen, presumably to make sure nothing is burning or boiling over.

Hux crouches beside the mat, which makes his knees crack, and looks to Shmi. “What do you think, darling? Is she hungry?”

“No. She’s just upset,” Shmi says sagely. Listening to her, Hux can’t help but notice that she’s beginning to pick up Kylo’s broad, rather unappealing Core accent. He’s not sure what can be done about that. “She wants someone to hold her.”

“Then someone ought to,” Hux says. “Can you hold her for me?”

Shmi nods. In the last four months, she’s displayed an almost uncanny ability to guess what the baby wants: whether she’s hungry, or tired, or just wants to be held. It may be that Shmi is an especially good guesser. More likely, she’s picked up on the differences between Delphine’s cries. Each one is somewhat distinctive; Hux can usually tell a hungry cry from one triggered by discomfort. Kylo claims that Shmi’s accuracy is Force-related—but he says that about everything.

Quickly, Shmi clambers up onto the couch and holds out her hands, while Hux scoops Delphine off the mat. She’s still crying loudly. He bounces her against his shoulder for a moment, kisses the top of her head.

“Be gentle with her, Shmi,” he cautions. Most of the time, Shmi’s good with the baby, but she has the capacity to be too rough. Hux isn’t convinced this is totally accidental; rather, it seems like Shmi is feeling out the boundaries of acceptable behavior. She gets jealous of Delphine now and then, who takes up so much of her parents’ time.

“I know, Daddy,” Shmi says, as he transfers the baby into her lap. He makes sure Delphine’s head is supported by Shmi’s arm. “Hush, Del, you’re all right. Don’t worry, I know what you wanted…”

Once they’re settled, Hux goes back to working on the droid, half his attention on the girls. Delphine continues to wail for a while, but her crying tapers off as Shmi continues talking to her. Before long, Shmi has Delphine babbling contentedly.

“You’re good at that,” Kylo says, appearing in the doorway. He must’ve gotten the food under control.

Shmi makes a noise of agreement. “She’s a good baby. She likes me more than she likes you.”

Kylo sputters a laugh. “You might be right about that, princess.”

By the time Hux completes the repair, it’s time for Delphine to eat again. She’s still in Shmi’s lap, apparently content, so Kylo shows her how to hold the bottle and leaves her to it while he checks on dinner.

Hux switches Obie back on. It takes her a moment to fully power up, her blue eye-lights brightening. Suddenly, her head snaps upright.

“I’ve made some adjustments,” Hux says. “How is it?”

Obie’s limbs swivel and twist experimentally. She waggles her synthskin-covered fingers, tapping them together. “Oh, much better,” she reports cheerfully. “Thank you, sir.” Glancing aside, she notices Shmi and approaches the couch. “I can take her, dear.”

“That’s okay,” Shmi says, without looking up. She has those moments of jealousy, but most of the time, Shmi is fascinated by Delphine: her tiny hands and feet, her expressions and noises, her utter helplessness. “I’ve got her.”

Looking at them, it strikes Hux, once again, that this is too good to keep. For half a decade, they’ve lived peacefully on this moon, unknown and undisturbed. But it won’t go on like this forever. He would be foolish to think otherwise.

“Obie, keep an eye on them,” Hux says, and goes into the kitchen.

Kylo is at the stove, facing away from the door, prodding at something in a pot. “Are you here to apologize for biting my head off?”

Out of habit, Hux feels himself frown. “No,” he says. “You know how that noise gets to me.”

That makes Kylo laugh. “Close enough.”

\--

“I’ve been thinking,” Hux says quietly, as he watches Kylo place Delphine in her crib later that evening. She’s sleeping in their bedroom for the time being, until she’s a bit older; if she wakes up and cries in the night, Obie slips silently into the room to take care of her. Sometimes, though, Hux or Kylo will get up to manage Delphine instead. “We ought to have a plan for emergencies. All this time, we’ve been behaving as if there’s no chance we’ll ever be discovered. But it didn’t take much for Phasma to find us. As far as we know, New Republican ships could descend on this moon at any time.”

“And we’d be completely unprepared,” Kylo says. He keeps looking at Delphine for a moment, then glances up. “The important thing is to decide what to do with the girls—how to evacuate them, with or without us.”

“My thoughts exactly.” It’s funny, almost. Once upon a time, when Hux was a prisoner and dimly planning an escape, he’d never entertained the possibility of his child coming with him. He simply couldn’t see a scenario in which they both escaped, so his own life took priority. But now, his immediate thought is of the children.

He would’ve seen it as a weakness once. Now he’s not sure how to classify that impulse. If he ever has to choose between saving his own life and saving the girls, though, he knows what he’ll pick.

Sometimes he thinks that General Hux really is dead. It doesn’t sadden him the way it used to.

For a while, he and Kylo discuss logistics—the bare bones of it, anyway. Hux can see that this plan will be complicated. It will take considerable time to make arrangements and set up all the moving parts. Really, they should’ve been preparing for years, almost as soon as they settled on this moon. But Hux allowed himself to get comfortable here, complacent. He waited too long. Now all he can do is try to make up for lost time and hope it’s enough.

“I thought we might mention this to Phasma, the next time she comes around,” Hux says. “She may have some ideas about out-of-the-way planets we could fall back to. And she might be persuaded to lend some further assistance, if it comes to that. You know how fond she is of the girls.”

Kylo doesn’t respond at first, just studies Hux with dark eyes, as though considering something. “I knew it,” he says at last. “I knew you weren’t that sentimental.”

“I beg your pardon?” Hux’s eyebrows arch.

“That’s the real reason why you wanted to name Delphine after Phasma, isn’t it? You thought she’d feel more attached to the girls that way—more willing to help them.” Kylo was shaking his head, in what looked like a blend of amusement and disbelief.

“It may have crossed my mind,” Hux tells him, diplomatically. Ever since Phasma showed up at the garage, the need for a contingency plan has been swirling in Hux’s mind—and the night Delphine was born, the two items came together. He’s not above exploiting a personal relationship for his own gain. And besides, they had to call their new daughter something. It might as well be a name that could benefit her someday. He feels compelled to add: “Regardless, Delphine is a perfectly pleasant name.”

A slow smile spreads across Kylo’s face. “You manipulative bastard,” he says fondly, and kisses Hux.

\--

The day’s paperwork is spread out on the kitchen table in front of Hux: receipts, invoices, orders for new parts. He has to put on his glasses to make out the smaller text. He only uses them for reading, but the day he bought them—at Kylo’s insistence, after weeks of badgering—it felt he was making an awful concession. Stars, he’s getting old.

At least his eyes are still good enough to see Kylo perched on the end of the couch. Shmi is seated cross-legged on a mat in front of him, as if in meditation, her head tipped forward to Kylo can untie her braid and comb out her long, dark hair. She’s eleven now, with skinny limbs like Hux at her age, and an angular face like Kylo’s. Now that she’s getting older, she spends more and more time in the garage, watching her parents work, tinkering with her own projects. There’s always grime under her nails, no matter how Hux gets after her to wash her hands.

Delphine sits on the floor near her sister, working through tonight’s Force lesson. At six years old, she’s graduated from simple push-and-pull exercises to slightly more complex ones: stacking and unstacking painted wooden blocks; tying a knot in a length of string; moving small stones from one pile to another, one at a time. Presently, she’s arranging blocks into a pyramid. She uses her hands to guide the process, though she doesn’t touch the blocks.

In the background, the holonews is on, the feed slightly grainy, damaged by radiation as it bounced from the Core to the Outer Rim. A lavender-skinned Twi’lek reporter goes from discussing the weather in Coruscant’s capital to the construction of a new public memorial to honor the victims of the Starkiller attack.

“The memorial garden will open next month,” the reporter says, “on the thirteenth anniversary of the destruction of the Hosnian System.”

Thirteen years already. Hux almost can’t believe it.

Glancing up and over at him, Shmi asks, “That’s what you did, isn’t it, Daddy?”

He pauses. They’ve been through this before. Since Shmi was a baby, he’d been considering how to explain the Hosnian System to her. In his estimation, there was no single best approach—but there had to be at least a decent way.

The opportunity presented itself when she was eight. It was the first time she saw a holonews broadcast that mentioned General Armitage Hux. An image of him flashed on the display. He was younger, clean-shaven, with his hair cut to regulation length, and dressed in full uniform.

Shmi had never seen him like that, but she recognized him all the same. She’d frowned at the holo for a long moment. Then she said, uncertainly, “Daddy—that’s you.”

Up to that point, Shmi had known that their family was technically in hiding, that her parents had enemies who would kill them on sight, that her extended blood relatives were entwined with the New Republican government—but it was hard to impress upon her the significance of all that. She knew precious little of the war, except for snatches she’d heard on the holonews, and what Hux and Kylo had told her. It seemed inappropriate, somehow, to dump the whole sordid story onto her when she was too young to understand, when she had no concept of the past.

But the past had caught up with them, in the form of Hux’s image on the holonews. And so he explained it to her, almost gently, the way he’d practiced a hundred times in his head. She listened, and nodded, and when he was done, she went off to play with her sister. Hux wasn’t sure how much she actually absorbed, but at least he’d told her.

She’s asked questions in the years since, which he has answered. He’s done much the same for Delphine, who is younger and less curious about the particulars, though he expects that will change as she grows up. A long time ago, he promised himself—more than that, he promised Kylo—that he would be honest with their children.

Shmi and Delphine know that he designed the weapon, and that he gave the order to fire it. He’s explained that the weapon was not built for wanton destruction, nor to cause suffering for its own sake, but to end a war with a single, decisive strike, so the rest of the galaxy could flourish. And he’s told her what a waste it turned out to be in the end, because he lost the war.

To the girls, it must seem like a wild story, like something that couldn’t possibly be real. But one day, he knows, it will become real to them—and in that moment, he’ll become real to them, too, a whole person, and not just their father. Maybe they’ll be disgusted by him when that happens.

He hopes it’s a long time from now.

“Yes, darling,” he says to Shmi now. “That’s what I did.” He clears his throat and sets his paperwork aside for the moment. “Let’s go through it again, shall we?”

“I know it already,” Shmi complains.

“So prove it. If there’s an emergency, what’s the first step?”

She heaves a long-suffering sigh. “Grab the bag from under my bed and make sure Del has hers,” she says tonelessly. “Go out the back, quiet as I can. Take the speeder to the shuttle. If you’re not there in an hour, or if the sensors pick up anything suspicious, select the preprogrammed coordinates and leave without you.”

The shuttle is hidden in the woods south of the city, camouflaged by greenery. Kylo and Hux acquired it years ago, when Delphine was a baby, and they make occasional trips out to the hiding place to make sure it’s in good repair, ready to take off at a moment’s notice. Over the last few years, they’ve stocked the shuttle with rations to last six standard months, basic medical supplies, an array of blasters, a few changes of clothing in assorted sizes, and a stash of credit chips.

Once activated, the preprogrammed coordinates will take the shuttle to a tiny planet halfway across the quadrant, a long-abandoned mining colony. It’s a rocky little speck of a world, but it has breathable atmosphere, and it’s not on anyone’s radar. Hux only knows about the place because one of Kylo’s smuggler friends—now deceased—used it as a rest stop between jobs, decades ago. Kylo skimmed the location from the old alien’s mind, and once Hux had the coordinates, he took care of the rest.

“When you land, how long will you wait there?” Kylo asks, as he gently unwinds Shmi’s hair from the complicated-looking plait. In the yellow lamplight, her hair shines like dark water. Kylo’s hands move with a calm certainty.

“Three days.”

Kylo picks up a brush. “And if I don’t show up by the end of the third day, and neither does Daddy?”

“That means you’re dead,” Shmi says simply. “So I should input the second set of coordinates—the one you had me memorize—and use the special channel to talk to Phasma. She’ll meet us.”

Shmi knows, in the abstract, what “dead” means. But she’s only eleven and hasn’t encountered death firsthand. She can’t yet comprehend the reality of it. Still, Hux and Kylo have impressed upon her that she should assume that they’re dead, if one or both fail to arrive at the rendezvous point. Shmi and Delphine have to proceed as if no one is coming for them, so they don’t waste valuable time waiting for their parents to appear.

Of course, if Kylo and Hux aren’t dead, but merely delayed, Hux is confident that either of them will be able to catch up with the girls. He has his ways, and so does Kylo. But Shmi hasn’t been told that. It seems better not to give her false hope that might disappoint her in the end.

“Yes,” Hux says. “But what if something happens to Phasma?”

“Then I open the compartment in the shuttle and follow the instructions on the datachips.”

Stowed in that secret compartment is a whole collection of datachips, containing documents and holos. It was Kylo’s idea to record the messages that way, when the girls were younger. He thought that Shmi and Delphine would find it encouraging to see their parents’ faces, hear their voices.

Some of the holos detail additional contingency plans, including other safe places to rest and regroup. But most contain other kinds of information: how to troubleshoot a finicky hyperdrive; how to repair a jammed blaster; how to cook the beef stew that Shmi and Delphine like so much. Anything that might be necessary or useful when the girls got older was meticulously recorded. If the worst happens and neither Hux nor Kylo have the opportunity to teach those things to their daughters in person, at least the information will be there for reference. The holos, Hux thinks, are one of Kylo’s best ideas.

“And what’s the last step?” Hux prompts. “If you’re caught, and you think you’re about to be hurt, what will you do?”

Shmi glances up at him, while Kylo continues brushing out her hair. “I’ll say that Leia Organa is my grandmother and I need to speak with her.”

That last touch was Hux’s idea. If the girls are ever captured, it will most likely be by New Republican operatives, though bounty hunters are also a distinct possibility. The former would almost certainly contact Organa before taking decisive action out of a sense of military loyalty; the latter would do the same in the hopes of wringing a few credits out of her. In any situation, Shmi and Delphine are worth more alive and intact than dead or maimed. Whatever happens after that will be up to Organa.

To this day, Kylo isn’t convinced that she would intervene on the girls’ behalf. She did, after all, hand Shmi off to strangers. How much can she be expected to care?

It’s a fair point, but Hux takes a different view. He doubts Organa would let her own granddaughters be imprisoned or killed, even if they are Hux’s blood as much as hers. And more than that, she has a guilty conscience. She has regrets about how she raised her son. Shmi and Delphine may be able to use that to their advantage someday. It might save their lives.

“That’s exactly right, darling,” Hux says to Shmi.

She wrinkles her nose. “I _told_ you I knew it.”

“And now I believe you.” He takes off his spectacles. “What about you, Delphine? If your father and I aren’t around, and neither is Phasma, what’s the most important thing?”

Delphine floats another block onto the top of the pyramid. It looks precarious. “I should do what Shmi says, because she knows the plan, and the plan will keep us safe.”

“How do you know that?”

“Because you made it for us,” Delphine says, lightly, like it’s a simple thing. To her, Hux supposes, it is.

He smiles faintly. “Just so. Very good.”

The four of them discuss the plan regularly, and sometimes do dry runs out to the shuttle, but the girls don’t really understand what it all means, or what it would be like if the plan has to be put into action one day. To them, the New Republic is a distant shadow that’s never touched their lives. Shmi and Delphine have lived peacefully on this moon. The threat isn’t real to them. They are not afraid.

Part of Hux is grateful for that. But another part of him worries that nothing he does will fully prepare them for what could happen, that his best efforts won’t be enough to protect them.

“Finished,” Kylo says, as he sets the brush aside. “Your turn, Del.”

Instantly, Delphine abandons her task and hops to her feet, knocking a few wooden blocks out of place in her rush. Shmi throws out her hands and keeps the pyramid from toppling, from several feet away, using the Force. Brow pinched in concentration, she nudges a few blocks back into place, stabilizing the whole thing.

“I can do Del’s hair, Papa,” Shmi says, dropping her hands. Lately, she’s taken to practicing her braiding on Delphine. The end result is usually lopsided, but Kylo praises her efforts all the same, and Hux supposes she has to practice on _someone_ or she’ll never be able to do it herself.

“If you insist,” Kylo says with a smile, handing her the brush. He slides over, and Shmi takes his seat while Delphine comes over to the mat. “Want me to show you a new one?”

Shmi unpins the braid wrapped around the crown of Delphine’s head and then unwinds the plait. For a minute, Hux watches her work carefully on a different braid, while Kylo talks her through the steps. Delphine, meanwhile, appears somewhat bored. She begins slowly floating blocks across the room to her, one by one, starting at the top of the pyramid.

It strikes Hux, in moments like this, that his whole life is a glitch in the system. By all rights, he shouldn’t be here. He should’ve been made to answer for his failures—not just Starkiller, but the series of disasters and missteps that followed, leading up to his capture. He should’ve gone down with the _Finalizer._ He should’ve been executed, along with the rest of High Command. For the better part of two decades, the whole galaxy has been gunning for him. It doesn’t make any sense that he’s lived this long.

And yet, here he is. He has a husband and daughters, when he should have nothing. Kylo would say it’s the will of the Force. Hux doesn’t know what it is. He just knows that it’s his—at least for now. And he’s going to do everything in his power to make it last.

Hux puts his glasses on again and goes back to the paperwork, listening to the sounds of his family, and the rain outside.

**Author's Note:**

>  **additional content warnings:** miscarriage; mentions of menstruation; mentions of blood; morning sickness + vomiting; brief references to dfab anatomy; non-graphic birth (if the similar scene in Bear wasn’t too much for you, then you’ll probably be okay for this one, as well). if you notice anything else that you think I should add a warning for, please [drop me a line](http://saltandrockets.tumblr.com/ask) and I’ll take care of it as soon as possible.
> 
>  **as for the regular end notes:** well, here it is! thank you for being so patient with me while I worked on this installment. it took much longer to write than I thought it would, but I hope it was worth the wait.
> 
> in other news, I’m planning at least one more installment, best described as “the Skywalker-Organa-Solo-Hux family reunion.” (you may want to [subscribe to the series](http://archiveofourown.org/series/490429), if you haven’t already, to get an email alert when it’s posted.) however, it won’t be finished for a little while, since I’m taking a short break from IDWL to work on an unrelated kylux one-shot that I’m very excited to share.
> 
> thank you again for sticking with the series so far! I really appreciate it. every comment, kudos, and tumblr message means the world to me.
> 
> come say hello [on tumblr](http://saltandrockets.tumblr.com/)! xoxoxoxo


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